Wrapping Up 2023

On a plane

It’s hard to avoid summarising the past year when my fiancé is sleeping next to me holding our exactly half year old baby on her lap and we, a family, are heading to Egypt and spending the Christmas holidays there.

Business outlook

The year was crazy in becoming a dad sense, but it was a crazy rollercoaster ride in professional sense as well: in March I switched to heading energy domain businesses at Futurice Finland. There have been a lot to learn for me and the company: Futu has been growing strongly and this combined to the economic slow down was a point which required steep learning curve and new measures from me and the company – something which has been utmost interesting is that the energy sector is one of the areas in our society which is basically not affected but the companies just did their all time best profits.

The shift of business

At the times, I’ve been experiencing pressure about the expectations to support the company with the energy businesses whereas other businesses have been declining a bit. However, we’ve done well. Energy companies are now seeking improvements in their leadership abilities, assessing their level of technological understanding, and redesigning the ways of doing to support the previous. And exactly all this we have been doing. I’m happy that we have succeeded in founding a nice bunch of new energy company logos to work closely with.

Cases

And boy the subjects we are working with are facinating; Futurice has been leading an AI program for a one mid-sized energy company including a case discovery phase for some of the business areas, sparring board of directors and planning already expansion of case discovery to the rest of the businesses. Notable fact is, that there are not too many of real life business cases utilising AI, as I learned at Enlit Europe fair in Paris a few weeks back.

Then we did a tripartite facilitation gig in order to reshape certain cost heavy process between one energy company and a contractor. Results were staggering and we ended up in multiple investment areas covering both sides of the end-to-end process parties – talking about significant cost savings to the parties and improvements in customer experience.

Maybe the most peculiar ”case” has been PSET, Pohjois-Suomen Energiatieto, probably the northernmost energy services expert owned by 12 energy companies. The word CASE is written with quotation marks because we have been helping implement their strategy and approaching the target to move from absorption principle based business to competed markets. The more have we dived deeper into their doings the more different tasks we have been helping with: finding out what customers are really expecting and how are they experiencing existing services, should there be new kinds of services in portfolio, what are the weakpoints, and how should PSET prioritise and lead the development. We set up the first iteration of OKR’s, and even helped defining the red line of service production.

New Year

Compared to the situation when I started at Futu, we are definitely in better shape, we are better known, and most of all we have bunch of new interesting customers and cases to work with. I’m expecting the new year being one of the most interesting if not the most interesting yet in my career.

I’m hoping you guys to be part of my 2024 story – let’s have a wonderful new year together!!