[Leslie Cook (Adm)]

Thanks so much, @Joyce, for allowing UAI to feature you this month in our member spotlight. I loved reading about your career progression. It has been such a pleasure to get to know you within this community. You were the very first person I met when I started working at UAI. We were in Phoenix during the 2019 UA Week event. Thank you for everything you do to progress this community and the industry! ​

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Leslie Cook
Membership & Digital Engagement Manager
Utility Analytics Institute (UAI)
719-203-8650, lcook@utilityanalytics.com
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Original Message:
Sent: 06-03-2022 11:19
From: Kevin Praet
Subject: June (2022) Member Spotlight: Joyce LePage (DTE Energy)

@Joyce is an active UAI member and provides outstanding influence and contributions to the UAI community through any of our multiple channels, including, but not limited to engagement on UAI Connect, volunteering with UAI, involvement and/or leadership in monthly Community Conversations, and/or speaking at UAI events, plus so much. As thanks, we are featuring her in the UAI Member Spotlight.

With over 20 years of industry experience, Joyce’s passion for data-driven, digital-first technologies has helped DTE Energy prepare for high priority initiatives in the grid reliability and customer experience space. As a Founding Member of DTE’s Enterprise Data and Analytics group, Joyce led determination of the design, operation, and expansion of cloud services that enable her business partners across the organization with a vast variety of capabilities including Cloud Data and Analytics, Enterprise Automation, and Innovation. Joyce is currently serving in the Distribution Operations organization as a leader in an initiative transforming the way DTE communicates with their customers. A certified Six Sigma Black Belt, Joyce strengthens the value of her technology expertise with the delivery of organizational strategies that include the development of high-caliber Business Transformation Teams that follow both Agile and Lean Methodologies.

 

Kevin: How did you get into the utility analytics industry?

Joyce: I have always had a love of the precise nature of data. From a career standpoint, I actually started my career as a clinical microbiologist, where a good deal of the work I did involved the measurement of the concentrations of antibiotic required for the best patient outcomes. Once we measure something and write it down, we’ve created data. From the laboratory I went into the sales and marketing of (among other things) those systems that collect, store and report data in laboratories. I moved into utilities from there as a Quality Analyst and moved through the company in several roles, but always one with a data component (what isn’t, lol) and eventually led DTEs establishing of our first Enterprise Data & Analytics group and Enterprise Datalake.

 

Kevin: What project have you enjoyed working on most in your career?

Joyce: Ok, that is sort of like asking me my favorite travel destination! I like them all.  Honestly. Every assignment or opportunity has a component of adding value and moving the needle in the right direction for the greater good. I need to be learning, collaborating, adding value and making things better for someone else and I’ve been involved in a number of projects where I could do all of those things.  The “loop” gets closed when I can share learnings with others. If I talked about one of my favorites, it would be that of leading implementation of the company’s first ever datalake. The project was a standout because of the value that it brought to the enterprise and the opportunity it brought to the entire team to learning new technologies and methods along the way to share with others. We approached the implementation using “one use case at a time” as our mantra and guidepost, with plans to deliver business value as quickly and regularly. With it, we were able to instantiate our Azure subscription and stand up our first data ‘puddle’ in about 6 months. With each use case, the team created just enough of new design patterns, more data to the lake and enabled our collaborators in the business to unlock insights not previously available. Concurrently, we stood up a data user group so that the early adopters could share learnings and stories of success with other areas of the enterprise. While the majority of the ‘big’ datasets are already available in the datalake (outage, customer, AMI, telemetry, GIS, etc), demand to add more is still high after nearly 4 years.

 

Kevin: What has been your biggest professional challenge and how did you work through it?

Joyce: DTE implemented SAP a number of years ago for all of the backoffice functions, and at the same time Maximo for work management.  My role was to plan and execute the cutover from old to new, particularly conversion of all the master, semi-transactional and transactional data.  At the time, sheer volume of the data required a load time of several weeks and we were given a window of several  days to make it happen.  Seemed like an impossible task at the time, but I proposed a potential solution and as a team we worked it out and made it happen. I still remember the day when I brought that possibility to my boss – he was so relieved that we could make it work that he gave me all the money in his pocket, about 37 cents as a reward : )

 

Kevin: If you could go back in time and give yourself one piece of advice before entering the utility analytics industry, what would it be?

Joyce: Keep an open mind! As expected, we all approach new challenges with the foundation of all of our prior learnings.  It is easy to wear the blinders of experience and lose out on what’s possible. We live in a time where nearly everything we do generates some sort of data and it’s no different in our world of utilities. We have begun making information available for folks to discover insights via combination of datasets that were either unavailable or non-existent, or we didn’t have adequate computing capacity to analyze these datasets. Thinking without limitations of what we believe is possible is, in my opinion, key to discovering true value in the data.

 

Kevin: What would you like to talk to fellow colleagues and members about in UAI Connect? Or, what issues or topics would you like to see more discussions on in UAI Connect?

Joyce: Personally, I am interested in hearing more about how my colleagues at other utilities are approaching data quality. Identification of opportunities, profiling tools, correction, processes/governance for keeping the data clean, establishing ownership and FTEs dedicated to the activity.

 

Kevin: Thank you so much for sharing with us and for being a highly engaged member of UAI!

Do you have any final thoughts, ideas, or comments you would like to share with your fellow UAI members?

Joyce: I would like to encourage everyone to continue engaging in UAI and talk to others in their organizations about the value of participating. What I have appreciated most about this group is the commonality of objectives, the willingness to share and the resulting opportunities for collaboration. 

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Kevin Praet
Membership Coordinator
Utility Analytics Institute (UAI)
Boulder CO
315-440-3033
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