Smart grid, legacy back office: The technical debt utilities are carrying into their next transformation phase

Article

J.D. Power’s 2025 United States Electric Utility Residential Customer Satisfaction Study recorded the lowest satisfaction score ever measured — 499 out of 1,000 — with billing reliability and outage communication identified as the primary levers available to recover it. The same dynamic is playing out across markets. In the United Kingdom, energy providers paid out approximately £20 million in compensation for billing mistakes over five years, with complaints up 141% over that period and billing disputes accounting for 58% of all Energy Ombudsman cases in 2024.

Those aren’t customer experience problems in isolation. They’re symptoms of whether back-office processes run reliably, in sequence and at scale. For most large utilities, the orchestration layer responsible for that is still catching up to the grid it’s supposed to support.

Utilities have spent the better part of a decade winning the case for grid modernization, deploying Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI), integrating renewable energy and managing Distributed Energy Resources (DER). Grid edge intelligence is generating more operational data than most organizations know what to do with. What hasn’t moved at the same pace is the software layer connecting all of that to the business processes that serve customers and satisfy regulators.

In most large utility environments, these application and data pipeline workflows are still being automated by legacy schedulers and scripts designed before hybrid cloud existed, before AMI was standard and before a single weather event could simultaneously spike customer calls, outage jobs and data ingestion volumes across a dozen interconnected systems.

The seam running through every utility’s automation environment

Utilities deal with a version of the problem with an extra dimension: the systems that run the grid and the systems that run the business weren’t built to work together — and for most of their history, they didn’t need to.

Operational technology (OT) and information technology (IT) evolved in parallel in most large utilities, governed by different teams and built to different standards. AMI put metering data in both worlds simultaneously. DER integration put real-time grid signals into billing and settlement workflows. Outage management systems started feeding customer communication platforms. What most utilities built to bridge that divide was a collection of schedulers, scripts and point-to-point integrations, each solving a specific problem without anyone owning the full picture.

As a result, a meter-to-cash workflow can touch a dozen systems with their own scheduling layers and their own definitions of “done.” When one step slips, the cascade is difficult to see and harder to interrupt because no single platform spans the full picture. For years, keeping those worlds loosely coupled was an acceptable tradeoff. It isn’t anymore — not when time-of-use tariffs, demand response activations, electric vehicle charging programs and AI-driven forecasting all require them to move in sync.

Stress reveals weakness

In the utility sector, spikes aren’t rare, and they’re considerably less forgiving of fragmented automation than normal conditions. During a major weather event, for instance, utility operations teams are running outage management workflows, restoration sequencing and customer communication jobs simultaneously, while billing cycles, AMI data ingestion and regulatory reporting continue in the background. Each process depends on others completing in the right order, at the right time, against dependencies that no single monitoring console can see across.

The response ends up being human coordination: multiple dashboards, manual judgment calls, compliance trails that go dark and a customer experience that degrades in ways that are difficult to trace after the fact. Regulators and customers don’t distinguish between a transmission failure and a process failure. When automation silos prevent outage workflows and billing systems from executing in sync, the damage is the same.

The operational case for addressing this is clear. The organizational dynamics around doing so are considerably less straightforward. Legacy scheduler renewal contracts route through procurement, extensions get signed and the harder conversation about whether the solution still fits the strategy gets deferred. Another cycle of expensive upgrades with painful agent patching gets funded, and the war-room model gets staffed again during the next storm season.

AI ambition and the foundation it needs

The IFS Global Utility Survey 2024 found that 82% of utility executives consider AI essential to their digital transformation strategy, yet only 20% have completed that journey. That gap isn’t primarily a technology problem, as every utility surveyed had initiated transformation. The ones stalled are the ones that haven’t addressed the execution layer underneath their AI ambitions.

Predictive outage management, demand forecasting, dynamic pricing — none of these perform against fragmented, inconsistently sequenced data workflows, and no amount of hiring fixes an orchestration layer that can’t support the models sitting on top of it. Closing that gap requires consolidating what sits underneath the models, and the utilities moving fastest on AI are the ones that addressed the orchestration layer first.

Consolidating onto a strategic orchestration platform

That’s the shift utility companies are making with RunMyJobs by Redwood. They’re replacing legacy tools, open-source schedulers and bridging scripts with a single orchestration and execution control plane that governs end-to-end workflows across the full span of utility operations.

Legacy, self-hosted workload automation (WLA) schedulers require agents installed across every server and environment, each tied to OS updates, security patches and version dependencies. In a hybrid OT/IT utility environment, that maintenance load is constant, consuming engineering time, increasing technical debt and operational costs that boards are now expecting to fund AI initiatives and digital transformation instead.

RunMyJobs SaaS is cloud-native and agentless. Updates arrive as part of the SaaS service, so you maintain your cybersecurity posture without dedicated patching cycles. The engineering capacity previously absorbed by platform maintenance shifts toward grid digitalization and the AI programs already on the roadmap.

For utility operations teams, that translates directly:

• Billing cycles, regulatory submissions and outage workflows no longer depend on manual monitoring to catch failures — built-in dependency management and real-time triggering respond automatically when a step doesn’t complete on time
• Audit-readiness is built into execution by default, with every step logged and traceable, so compliance reporting doesn’t require post-hoc reconstruction
• Grid resilience improves measurably, as 99.95% uptime means mission-critical outage and restoration workflows execute under peak load without adding infrastructure or having lots of people on call
• SAP and non-SAP systems orchestrate from a single platform, eliminating the parallel scheduling layers and maintenance-heavy custom scripts most utilities are currently running

Consolidation also changes the economics. Restrictive, self-hosted legacy licensing, maintenance fees and unpredictable cost increases are replaced by transparent, predictable SaaS pricing — and total cost of ownership (TCO) drops meaningfully when agent patching, infrastructure management and upgrade projects that delivered no new capability are no longer on the bill. That spend gets redirected toward AI initiatives and digital transformation programs that boards are already asking about. For IT leaders, that’s legacy costs converting into investment fuel. For business leaders, it’s the operational headroom to bring new tariffs, demand response programs and customer-facing digital services to market faster.

Renewal as the decision point

Most large utilities are closer to this decision than they realize. Legacy WLA contracts come up for renewal and get routed through procurement and extended for another cycle without the strategic question ever being asked.

If a renewal is on the horizon for your organization, the question worth asking isn’t whether your current environment is stable enough to extend, but whether “stable enough” is still sufficient for what the business is being asked to deliver.

Explore Redwood Software’s proven approach to migration and talk to an expert about what consolidation could look like in your environment.