Source: diginomica
Not quite 20 years old, Swiss energy firm MET Group is already present in 24 countries and 33 different national energy markets. The firm focuses on energy trading, wholesale and sales activities, and in 2025 it traded 241 billion cubic meters of natural gas and 160 terawatt hours of electricity. CDTO Bode, who joined the company in June 2022, says the business primarily serves the wholesale markets for corporate customers and is increasingly investing in assets for the energy transition, in particular solar and wind power, as well as battery storage.
Bode joined the company and took on the title Chief Digital Transformation Officer (CDTO) to lead the firm’s modernization, but to do so in a way that reflected the entrepreneurial manner of the business, he adds:
"MET had grown very quickly and had identified that the existing technology was no longer fit for purpose. The real issue, however, was broader: the debt was not only technological, but also rooted in non-scalable processes, unmanaged data, and limited access to information. The transformation therefore had to focus on ways of working and decision-making."
This had occurred, as in MET Group’s short life the business had made a series of acquisitions, and this had now reached a point where some standards in practice were needed. He adds:
"But there was also the independence of a very entrepreneurial environment, which meant the business had created small structures that had built what they thought made sense."
Inevitably, this led to an inability for MET Group to be able to effectively see what other parts of the business were doing and a limitation to scale business. Bode adds:
"This is where we needed to create consistency; despite acting in different markets, consistent and reliable information is a must for at least risk management and performance monitoring."
Bode’s challenge therefore was to deliver standardization of services, but not to get in the way of the innovation and independence of the business units. This began with a data governance program that was small and came from the top down and focused on risk management. He adds:
"This was difficult, as it brings some level of centralization, but the company was built against that idea. But centralization also adds value in terms of expertise. I am trying to convince people that this is the way to agility. They consider that they were agile, and they are right, but what they don’t see is that the agility was going down because of the size and complexity is going up. There will always be a stage where the complexity means that everything gets slow and people get frustrated cutting corners, therefore adding to the complexity.
I have seen this in previous companies, which are bigger, and when you want to change things, it takes years because in the back end you have all this legacy architecture lacking transparency and clear ownership. Here, we want to be fit for sustainable growth, so simplicity is sophistication. Simplicity is the opposite of being cheap, quick and dirty."
For the CDTO, that means having a lean organizational design, and a focus on the user processes. He says this was something he and his team achieved at jewelry and gifts firm Swarovski, where Bode was Vice President Data and Analytics for nine years. The structure of MET Group, which has divisions, which it calls segments, for trading and wholesale, European sales as well as renewables and assets, is very different but requires even greater focus:
"People are used to these small vessels, and if you work in small groups there is not much that you need to do to align, as they are used to figuring it out along the way. Therefore, when the company started to scale its operations, creating transparency on process and information became even more critical."
That start-up-like culture is something many peers would like to see spread across their enterprises.
Improving the power that data provided to MET Group has been central to the transformation. A data lakehouse has been implemented to provide that centralization and expertise. He says:
"For me it was very important to enable access to information. If we want people to be data-driven and to make decisions based on facts, and if we want people to care for the data that they create, then we must create reliable information and make it accessible."
Bode focused on creating a data architecture, and says the selection of a vendor for the data lakehouse was not a major challenge:
"I was convinced that the choice of supplier would not make a huge difference. Databricks and Snowflake are by far the leaders, and experts in the team were experienced with Databricks. Also, there was not the time to invest in spending three to six months assessing the usual suspects."
Databricks was chosen and sits within a technology stack that includes Microsoft and its Copilot technology for productivity, PowerBI for the data analytics and hosting by Azure and Bode has introduced Dataspot to enable data management.
Bode’s approach to change management is to bring different groups together around an opportunity or pain point in the business. He describes it as a complex way of networking, but it helps identify processes that need to change and the people that can sponsor that change. He adds:
"When these networks are established, that is when the agility kicks in, because when you want something to change, you know who to reach out to."
He doesn’t see it as being a network just for his challenges and remit, but for the entire organization. Then when there is a process, data or technology element to the need, he is there in the conversation from the start. It is a method he developed in his nine years at Swarovski, a business of 30,000 employees, and he says it was successful at dealing with product definition, customer insight and delivering projects within a few months. Networks, he says, are required to communicate in the same language and address dependencies. He adds:
"It takes time, because it goes deep into people’s beliefs, and you cannot decide on these for them. You can make a fantastic project and provide solid information, but that doesn’t mean that the next day that they will change the way they make decisions. Changing the way people work is not something you can dictate; it must be pushed, but in a certain way, and it takes time."
These are wise words and necessary as organizations adopt new ways of working as a result of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
That same approach is also helping Bode communicate to the business that digital transformation doesn’t have an end date or big bang releases. He believes constant change gives agency to business lines, and allows them to be the ones that set priorities.
Four years on from joining MET Group, Bode says there has been a transformation in the standard of reporting across the business, and his change team has engaged in a stream of continuous improvement:
"Process by process and function by function, better data and greater transparency are steadily improving the quality of our outputs."
Community is increasingly being understood as the way to ensure that change is successful for the business and its people. MET Group and Bode are powering ahead of many.