Marcus Wittig on DVVision: a foresighted organisation

We want to make our company fit for the future. We have a long phase of restructuring behind us, which we completed very successfully in 2018. But it was clear to us years before that cost-cutting is not a business model. We knew exactly where we wanted to go, which new business areas are of interest to us and what opportunities digitalisation offers.

The goal was clear, but the path to it was not mapped out. So we knew what we wanted, but not exactly how to get there. Because that places different demands on the structure of the company. That is why we launched the DVVision future programme, with which we are developing into a foresighted organisation. Such an organisation is able to recognise new challenges early and adjust to them accordingly.

A transformation like this needs time, backing and resources. DVVision is not a sprint but a marathon. That is why we designed the programme from the outset to run for at least five years.

We take the workforce with us and involve them intensively, relying on complete transparency and broad information. The name DVVision was proposed and chosen by employees themselves. And everyone can find detailed information about the ongoing process and the individual steps on the intranet, including on their smartphone.

Everyone has the opportunity to speak openly and thereby feed their own topics into the process. We take every piece of feedback very seriously. We as board members and managing directors also take responsibility in the programme together with all managers and actively contribute. We have learned to tackle issues across departments in order to overcome silo thinking more and more.

No, we deliberately did not want to pause the programme. So we continued DVVision during the pandemic and the lockdown phases too – in contactless form and transferred entirely to the digital world. The teams work together via video conferences and in virtual team rooms. As a result, we lost hardly any time on this important programme and were able to work on very demanding topics even without in-person events.

A lot. But first of all, it is important that DVVision has above all greatly changed the way we work together. We have noticed what an immense advantage it is when we bring together opinions and expertise from different areas. In this way we have taken positions on around 20 topics that are important for the future of the group.

They range from climate change, big data and smart city to the digital customer interface. To do this, we pooled the knowledge of all employees and experts, developed clear positions, thereby set a clear direction and drew up a plan for the future.

For example, it puts us in a position to approach the topics and the associated projects more strategically. We previously had many loose ends here, which we are now bringing together in a newly established corporate development unit. It will continue along the path we have taken, keep reflecting on our direction and observe trends or market changes so that we can adjust to new situations early. To ensure this, we have established new structures that, here too, rely on interdisciplinary, cross-divisional collaboration.

The customer is without doubt at the centre of all our efforts. It is precisely for this reason that we are reorganising in many areas, in order to make our products and services better and faster. For example, in future we will offer all products from a single source. This means: no matter how many companies and products there are under the umbrella of Stadtwerke Duisburg, in future there will be only one sales approach to the market.

We will bundle different products and develop new products together. That may sound simple, but there is a great deal of work behind it: to make this solution selling possible, we had to change structures and processes and reorganise the interaction between different units.

We have these clear goals for our mobility division too: DVG wants to become the mobility service provider in Duisburg and offer our customers other forms of mobility alongside buses and trains. These include on-demand services such as myBUS, but also sharing concepts. We think in terms of travel chains and want to get our customers to their destination by the best possible route for them. That is a long process and therefore also a medium- to long-term objective for the coming years.

We have various workstreams in DVVision: on the one hand, overarching and group-wide issues; on the other, the concrete structure and organisation of the individual specialist departments. The reorganisation of the specialist departments follows a structured pattern: first, we analyse the current situation unsparingly from an internal and external perspective. Because one thing is crucial for the success of the process: everyone involved must agree that change is urgently needed.

Then we jointly design the picture of the future and define the new structure based on the defined range of tasks, before finally ensuring that the right people are in the right positions. Our HR department supports this; we have also realigned it so that we can hold our own in the competition for skilled workers and the requirements in search and selection are met precisely.

Yes, absolutely. IT is always a special cross-cutting function and can quickly become a bottleneck. In our group there are also particular requirements: on the one hand, IT has to support the specialist departments in digitalisation and in developing new products. At the same time, it also wants to use the opportunities of digitalisation itself and bring forth its own new products.

In the transformation into a digital infrastructure service provider, we are playing a leading role on the way to the smart city; we build data centres and fibre-optic networks, are a provider ourselves and offer corresponding products and services. IT has to reconcile all these requirements; it can only do so if it can work in a well-structured and organised way. That is why IT is also one of the specialist departments that are particularly in focus in DVVision and on the way to becoming a foresighted organisation.