Mario Suykerbuyk has a thirty-year track record in IT. He started at Wolters Kluwer and, after various executive roles at TNT and Post NL, became CIO at Eneco in 2017. There, he warmed up to his current position as director of Business Technology Organization (BTO) at grid operator TenneT, which is rapidly digitizing its grids and processes. The goal is to make better decisions, better use the grids, and connect customers faster, which is badly needed for the energy transition.
What is currently the biggest task facing your organization?
“Without a doubt, it’s energy security and affordability: ensuring that the lights stay on at acceptable costs for you and me. We’ve been doing the former for years, which makes us the European leader. Our grid availability is more than 99.99 percent. We do this while the Netherlands and surrounding countries are electrifying at breakneck speed and TenneT is growing almost exponentially. We simply have to deal with a greater demand and supply of electricity that has to go through our grids. On those grids, we have to balance supply and demand from more and more renewable sources as well as balance the voltage level. Believe me, that is a challenge.
Where power supply used to be centrally organized with a few power plants and a power grid, today’s energy landscape has a completely different structure. There’s energy from wind, solar, biomass, consumers with solar panels on roofs, electric cars, and heat pumps to name a few. It’s a mix that makes our energy reliability more complex. And finally – I mentioned it and this is becoming increasingly important – we need to keep the energy transition affordable. Trees don’t grow to the sky. Those are actually the biggest challenges we see.”
What role do IT, data, and digitalization play in this?
“Data, IT, and digital are the preconditions, but at the same time, they are all determining factors in the energy transition. On the one hand, for detecting disruptions in our network, for example, so that we can intervene more quickly to guarantee the reliability of supply. And so we install all kinds of sensors throughout the network. Before, those were just a few sensors that gave a few signals every hour. Now there are sensors embedded in many of our technical components that are constantly ‘telling’ us how the component and our network are doing. And on top of that, we also have to do something with the huge mountain of data [from those sensors]. So that is where you see a huge increase, especially in the last two years.
“With the help of sensors and with information on wind, rain, and temperature as well as smart algorithms, we can now decide that extra power can be transferred over a certain connection.”
On the other hand, you see that much more electricity has to go through the grid. You can solve that by laying thicker cables or installing more lines, but you can also deploy smarter algorithms so that you can make better use of the grid. With the help of the sensors in our grid and information about wind, rain, temperature, and smart algorithms, we can now decide that there is room for some extra power over a certain connection. We call this dynamic line rating. In this way, we ensure that we make better use of our grid and therefore need to build less. Building costs a lot of money and mostly lots of time, which we simply don’t have.
That way we don’t have to grow exponentially and invest billions in cables, lines, and other infrastructure. With intelligence in our grid and smart algorithms, we make better use of the grid and buy extra time before the grid needs to be expanded. We are getting better and better at getting these kinds of innovations operational quickly. This is not only a technical challenge, it also has a human side. The operation, our internal customers, must gain confidence in this kind of technology. We are paying close attention to these changes and are familiarizing the operation step by step with the possibilities of AI and digitization. The size of the step is determined by the operation itself. We then often see that where at first there is reluctance, this turns into enthusiasm later.
With data, IT, and digital and the integration of IT and OT, we are also entering areas that are fairly new to us, such as predictive maintenance. For example, maintenance that was scheduled once a year, we now do this based on the data we receive from our network. This not only allows us to know more about our grid, but it also brings costs down. At our substations – the large transformers – we want to do some of the inspections with robots in the future. They will walk around and check whether components need maintenance. Eventually, we will digitize our entire grid in real-time. Right now we do inspections with helicopters and drones by taking shots, 14,000 images per kilometer, but there are plans to do inspections of our towers, power lines, and other assets using satellite imagery.”
What is your perspective as a leader?
“In my view, business and IT are one. The focus of the technology organization on the end-to-end processes is key. Here, the TenneT business is leading, it determines the objectives and key results; customers must be connected, connections realized, and 2-Gigawatt transformers built at sea. The IT organization helps the business to achieve these goals. IT and the business must flow seamlessly to achieve these business goals. Perhaps I am an atypical CIO; I’m completely on the business side and steer primarily on business output. That has a consequence for the IT organization. IT people within TenneT have to speak the language of the business.
This is why I don’t really have a separate IT strategy or digital strategy. What I do have is a TenneT strategy in which IT is integrated: security of supply, guarantee, faster construction, better utilization of our grid, and keeping it affordable. And there are some consequences in that for what you then have to do with your grid and IT.”
What are you proud of?
“I’m very proud of the reliability of the energy supply in the Netherlands. Especially because we have made a mega-acceleration in the last two years. Of course, it has to do with moving away from gas and everything that is happening in the world now. I’ve also worked at companies where every dime had to be turned over, that to keep the margin afloat you could really only get the costs down. Or at a company that was completely on the customer journey and then managed to achieve top-line growth of two or three percent. But what happens at TenneT involves huge investments and growth. And that gives a very different dynamic in an organization. I’m also proud of all the colleagues at BTO who make this possible.”
“Perhaps I am an atypical CIO; I am completely on that business side and steer primarily on business output. That has a consequence for the IT organization.”
What challenges do you still face as a leader and how will you try to solve them?
“IT continues to play a crucial role. We have committed to a platform strategy. Embedding all that business value and making sure that colleagues within the organization are using the digital tooling we provide. And making sure everyone starts thinking that way as well. That is a cultural change. The company is modeled on a lot of engineering and building, building, building. We have to balance that. This also means a shift in skill sets and competencies that are needed in the organization. Building out that ecosystem, together with partners and market players, should help ensure that the energy transition actually happens. That makes my playing field super broad. To steer that in the right direction and together ensure that supply reliability remains intact, and keeping it all affordable… I see that as the biggest challenge in the coming years.”
What is your motto? Do you have any recommendations for your peers?
“I’ve always worked at companies where shareholder value, margin, and cost burden were important. At some point, you get to a certain age, and you look for a purpose. That’s where I very consciously chose the energy world six, seven years ago. It’s all about making an impact. And not just impact in the role you have as the person responsible for IT or within the company you work for, but also outside of that. That makes my job super cool. Because the decisions you make with your team and the board of directors directly affect the future of all of us. I feel that responsibility and it gives me the extra drive to do things right.”
This year, we are celebrating 20 years of the CIO community. Looking back, what has been an inflection point for you?
“I’ve been in IT for thirty years. In the beginning, people said, ‘IT should be represented on the board’ and things like that. We’ve seen all kinds of things. But a couple of trends that have really gotten bigger and accelerated tremendously in the last two or three years are the platform economy with cloud and AI data platforms. This has brought a shift where we are no longer all building separate applications, but rather leveraging the power of those standardized platforms.
The emergence of AI is having a huge impact. Two years ago we were still experimenting, but now the question is no longer if you use it, but how. You also see it having a direct impact on your primary processes. And the great thing about it is that, with the right guidelines, you ultimately put it in the hands of the end user, who is at the controls on the business side. In the hands of the business, this is also going to fly much faster than as a tool in the hands of a bunch of IT people as in the past.
We didn’t talk about this before, but especially for a company like TenneT that’s responsible for a significant part of the energy supply in the Netherlands, cyber resilience is paramount. We must have a focus on security that reaches into the capillaries of BTO. It is the starting point for everything we do. So, in a nutshell: platforms, AI, and cyber resilience. To me, those are the real game changers.”