Case Study: Duke Energy achieves faster, data-driven validation of corporate strategy with VMware Tanzu

Duke Energy is using data to validate corporate strategies. You can, too

Duke Energy, a major utility navigating issues like IoT disruption, deregulation, electric‑vehicle demand, and customer experience, found its annual strategy cycle was too slow and expensive to validate assumptions. Traditional planning produced untested “strategy smoothies” that risked wasting a year of time and budget on ideas that might not work in the field.

To fix this, Duke formed small “journey teams” in a cloud‑native labs environment (83,000 sq ft, ~400 people) that use product‑style, rapid‑feedback techniques to prototype and test strategic assumptions with minimal pilots — for example, trialing a single RFID tag to see if real‑time worker location data can safely optimize nuclear plant labor. The result: faster, cheaper validation or invalidation of ideas, higher executive confidence in chosen strategies, and more room to experiment and iterate toward solutions that actually deliver value.

Duke Energy

Brian Savoy

Senior Vice President, Business Transformation and Technology