Transforming Dark Data into Understood Information

Company Background

Bruce Power is one of the largest and most innovative nuclear-generating stations in the world. They set the standard for power generation around the world. With over 10,000 employees and contractors, they are responsible for generating a third of Ontario’s power.

The Challenge

Facing an end-of-life scenario in 2015, the company secured approval to continue until 2064 – but was still running things from a 20-year-old enterprise asset management system. Jay Hitchcock, Director of the Digital Transformation Office at Bruce Power, was faced with the massive challenge of turning their dark data into connected and understood information. Their legacy systems couldn’t handle the incoming volumes of data and were not keeping pace with workforce expectations around information retrieval.

The team at Bruce Power didn’t want to settle for the status quo.

The Solution

Bruce Power started with acknowledging they didn’t know what they didn’t know.

Shinydocs crawled the company’s structured and unstructured repositories, shining a light on the dark corners of their information, revealing data lapses, permission inconsistencies, and addressable flaws while building a true understanding of their data. This gave them the ability to confidently eliminate the information that wasn’t driving value to the organization.

As a result, redundant, obsolete and trivial (ROT) files were clearly identified and set on a path to remediation. Critical documents containing Personally Identifiable Information (PII), company IP, and security details could be identified and properly routed.

This data understanding was then extended out to the entire organization with Search, which was deployed to all end-users, allowing workers at Bruce Power to find the information they were after in seconds instead of hours. Hundreds of terabytes of digital and legacy content supporting hundreds of thousands of assets, best practices, and safety requirements were now readily available, completely searchable and immediately accessible with the appropriate permissions working in the background.

This immediately eliminated days of manual effort, allowing departments to make faster supply chain and operational decisions. Enterprise Search has been the key to uncovering the hidden value in Bruce Power’s data while effortlessly increasing the findability of business-critical information.