Sydney Water names acting CIO

Sydney Water has named the program director of its customer experience platform roll out Sridhar Pydipati as acting CIO.

Pydipati has been working on the delivery of the platform for the New South Wales Government–owned statutory corporation for the last two-and-a-half years, and was named acting general manager, digital business and CIO this month.

Pydipati fills the role vacated by George Hunt, who has become the utility’s acting general manager of customer strategy and regulation while Sian Leydon is on maternity leave. Prior to joining the utility Pydipati was a senior delivery manager with Wipro in the UK where he worked with Thames Water.

Sydney Water provides water and wastewater services to more than five million customers across Sydney, the Illawarra and the Blue Mountains, and responds to an average of 200,000 service fault calls each year.

In 2017 the utility selected a consortium led by Wipro to design, build and run new ERP, billing and CRM systems in a 'once in a generation investment' to implement what was one of the largest SAP S/4HANA landscapes for the utilities industry in Australia.

Pydipati has big shoes to fill in the CIO role. Having landed in Australia in early 2016 to take a role at the utility, Hunt “hit reset” at the New South Wales owned statutory corporation, leading a major digital transformation towards becoming “the hyper-connected utility”.

He was named CIO Australia’s CIO of the year for 2018, taking top spot in the annual CIO50 list.

Sydney Water will soon be submitting its business plan for the next four years to NSW’s Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal, so it can renew its operating licence. The current licence expires next year.

In May, the utility announced its new CEO would be SA Water chief Roch Cheroux. Current managing director Kevin Young will leave the organisation at the end of this month.