Thread regarding Enbridge Inc. layoffs

@96e no it’s not getting better. It’s stagnant which means it’s getting worse. I used to think our leadership was busy working on things. Now I think they spend their time on things that don’t matter. Probably just calculating their stock options.

@8r1 is it getting better? Have you seen positive change with the new CIO?

@8kk you would be too if you had deal with TIS

@805 you sound like an angry little man.

@776 what can you not comprehend? This argument is not that offshoring is a great modern evolution. You have been offshored because you have not kept up with the times running a late 90s model of business vs IT.

Evolve and you will become valuable again. The stupidest thing your management has been done is to continue this pathetic division of business and tech / and most of your leaders have instilled this idea that business people are luddites.

Corporate culture of enbridge makes people believe this too so they believe the bullsh-t that they are supposed to be id--ts in technology related matters and need saviors to figure out how to turn a computer on.

Ain’t drinking this fu---n kool aid and most IT mangers want to persist this idea so they can keep their cozy salaries and never deliver anything .

@70q who are you arguing with? That was my first post on this thread and I didn't outline any model. You’ve invented a straw man.

And if you think dumping core tech on offshore body shops is "modern evolution," you’ve swallowed the vendor sales deck whole.

Bringing this back to the topic at hand, Enbridge's operating model between the business and IT is fundamentally broken. Anyone who has worked in an environment with a genuine, healthy partnership between Business and Tech knows what we have here is far from it. Swinging to total BU anarchy isn't "modernizing", it's an abdication.

@6ym say what you want. But you’re stuck in this 1990s model of technology. It’s failing because your playbook of Business vs Technology is outdated.

And the messaging is clear - leaders have chosen to outsource because no one wants to evolve past the old school and evolve.

You’re a dinosaur. Join the modern age and leader will take you seriously

@6qr Call it drivel if it helps you sleep, but the diagnosis is spot on. Our entire tech strategy - I'm being charitable with ‘strategy’ here - isn't based on forward planning, rather it’s being sideswiped by old scars and someone’s personal trauma from a project that went sideways in 2015. We’re steering a multi-billion dollar enterprise based on folks who are butthurt over what happened 15 years ago. The whole point of hiring a CIO from the BUs was to sort out the friction, yet somehow the gap’s bigger than ever. Brilliant stuff.

@6ct reads like drivel produced by an MBA management consultant that only has experise is in PowerPoint and how to win drinking games in college.

I asked Copilot to review this thread.

An enterprise shifting from structured central oversight to ad-hoc, business-driven tech spending almost always runs the exact same playbook. When technical discipline is swapped for pure localized execution, short-term speed inevitably trades off against long-term stability and cost.

Here is how that trajectory naturally unfolds:

The 4-Stage Trajectory

• Stage 1: The Quick-Win Illusion
  Projects move fast because guardrails are removed. Central IT costs drop on paper, making leadership feel the pivot was an immediate success.

• Stage 2: Structural Friction & Technical Debt
  Business units buy overlapping, incompatible software. Quick-and-dirty builds start breaking under normal operational load, turning "agile" solutions into constant maintenance headaches.

• Stage 3: Risk Exposure & Budget Inflation
  Unchecked systems expose the organization to security vulnerabilities and compliance audit failures. Total corporate spend actually spikes as duplicate licenses, external fixes, and hidden shadow IT stack up.

• Stage 4: The Mandatory Reset
  Confronted by ballooning costs and unmanageable operational risk, executive leadership steps in. The pendulum swings back, forcing a costly re-centralization to re-establish standards, security, and governance.

The Takeaway: Decentralization without architecture standards doesn't eliminate bureaucracy—it just trades deliberate technical governance for operational chaos, higher total costs, and an inevitable cleanup down the road.

@62e lol same in LP on both counts. DSS team as useless as TIS - maybe even worse as they’ve steered us wrong a few times.

@618 In GTM, we don’t trust TIS because too often what got built, didn’t create value. TIS trusted that we knew what we needed and how it should work. Often we were wrong (our problem) or it didn’t work the way it was promised to (TIS’s problem). The DSS team was supposed to help fix this by ensuring we are doing better business planning. So far that hasn’t happened but it’s only been a few years and it’s a big ship.

@5m3 sorry your sr management sold you out to save a few bucks. Your vendor partners are on the front line - not you. That is why business does not trust you.

Remember - it’s not your great people behind the scenes it’s the people interacting with the customers / clients that set the tone.

If you go to a famed restaurant with a brilliant chef and they put dolts as your server that can’t take an order, are rude and/or useless, don’t k ow the menu and provide a poor representation of the restaurant do you go back? No you don’t ….

Same principle here and it is not going to change. Most good people in TIS are on the sidelines because it’s cheaper to use offshore SI and partners. It’s literally the corporate playbook now.

The cooks in the kitchen don’t give a sh-t

I’ve heard he is starting to break through with EMT. Making plans for change as USUI goes down. Probably for the better. Some reductions as well as overall headcount and budget needs to decline. He came to talk with a few of our teams recently and shared some details.

@5f4 I don’t follow you. Our CIO is (I think) a civil engineer. He was in Lp and projects before being cio.

Regardless, one thing I agree with is that we focus too much on the wrong technology. The core is strong but the tech that enables the business is weak. Our best people should be solutioning on the front lines for highest business value, yet we have virtually no presence there. Enabling the business with technology at Enbridge seems to be just giving them license to waste money chasing weak solutions.

@5av CIO are useless - they are accountants, not tech people.

So overall what does that say? Enbridge views technology and its people as a cost of doing business, not as an enabler of revenue or effeciency.

Can you blame them? Software vendors moving to SAAS, PAAS and pushing expensive cloud options has created a cost and ROI nightmare. All on software you can’t predict is going to work, reduce features, sunset. Also - the reliance of big 4 and Big 8 tech consulting is expensive and needs to be managed, although most times the big 4 / 10 do not have the experience and more interested in profit margins.

It’s the system as a whole that has contributed to this. It’s a system of 3rd party grifting that has been draining money for decades.

Enbridge wont change funding or its approach to technology because of this. Want to make a change and get control back? Get the consultants out of the c suite

@56a that offshoring and outsourcing was all driven by underfunding TIS. CIO has told us all a few times that he thought TIS was well funded and came in to see that there’s not enough money to cover costs. It’s not like any of us wanted to send that work offshore.

@4c4 competitive how? Why compete when you can create monopolies.

Wake up - there is no competition for enbridge in oil, gas, or utilities.

@48g business is making the technology decision because a decade of managed services and gate keeping management have resulted in low trust. Most business view TIS as a joke. Why you ask? Because we are the ones whom have to talk to the poor quality offshore people managing your support.

Your managed services partners have created a wall between you and the rest of the company.

No one the business trusts TIS because nothing ever gets done - you rarely get to speak with internal employees and their management literally gate keeps you from speaking to them.

Most of the managers are useless as well - they just toe the line, have no knowledge of their people, processes and business you are supporting.

Business has taken over decision making on apps because we weren’t capable of doing the job or the results were so poor it’s laughable.

Why do you think the CFO has the TIS group?

What happened to service costing? Used to be so much emphasis, we were told it was essential reporting - now it doesn’t seem to come up at all. New CIO doesn’t believe in it?

@48g ha what are you saying? Better off with Bhushan?

Yah this kind of thinking is the issue. The future is in the data. Enbridge can be more competitive with a few good systems and a lot fewer of your so called “smart people” trying to justify their existence with their spreadsheets. Post from TheLayoff.com

He needs to tell us where we’re headed.

With BI, the business decided what it needed and TIS decided how to deliver it. Now it feels like the business is deciding both. If that’s the choice, then be explicit about it.

With SA, authority is shifted, but not accountability. Business is makes technology decisions but TIS is owning the risk, architecture, cyber, and outcomes.

No wonder everyone’s confused. Nobody knows whether they’re supposed to govern, challenge, advise, or just enable.

I’ve been in a few meetings with him, but don’t know him well. Early impression is messaging is mostly high-level consultant speak. No depth of experience behind it.

You wouldn’t put someone into an engineering leadership role without them understanding how decisions flow through the lifecycle. FEED, design, assurance, commissioning, and operations all exist because upstream decisions have downstream consequences. He doesn’t need to be the technical expert, but needs enough experience to know what questions to ask and what risks to look for.

Technology is the same, if not more so. The processes, methodologies, lifecycle disciplines, and best practices aren’t intuitive. They exist because organizations have learned, often through painful experience, what happens when those disciplines are skipped.

The issue isn’t that someone can’t learn it. It’s that experience creates judgement and pattern recognition. Without that, he’ll rely on common sense and the advice of others and eventually that creates risk.

If he had a high-performing EMT that could consistently provide balanced, challenge-based advice, that would help. But if he had that, they wouldn’t have all been passed over for the CIO job.

@1dw The majority of TIS is already outsourced and that IS the problem!

Large multi-year contracts are paid to offshore companies to provide "support" which is cheaper on paper than hiring locally. In reality, offshore support is lacking skill, has poor communication, high turnover, and are only available 2-3 hours a day because they work in IST time. Most of the time they can't resolve issues without the intervention of a local FTE which defeats the entire purpose.

THIS IS THE NORM.

Unfortunately, these companies are now completely embedded in the organization and with TIS leadership.

@3e1 Infrastructure and Cloud: Moved Director of Cyber into Network back in March, that shifted other directors in that group around and some other manager changes.

@3bg what’s changed in Infrastructure and Cloud? Haven’t heard of any movement there.

@39f nope. Why I do I need to clean all your data with my spreadsheets.

Your applications send us back to the dark ages.

The only TIS department worth keeping is cyber security

He did do some changes, he shuffled Infrastructure and Cloud around and eliminated the infamous “Lab”. So far, these are welcomed changes to most people. He solved some “day one” issues out of the gate, if he moved too soon, people would criticize that.

@381 so what is he waiting for? I heard he started cleaning up Major Projects soon after landing there. Why is he not making changes in TIS?

@32n *OT Systems. You are aware that TIS develops and manages OT systems too, right??!?

And time to come out of the dark ages with your spreadsheets. Many of us moved on long ago. It’s a brave new world of data and analytics and the insights therein.

No diversity in SMT?? That’s funny!
SMT has plenty of issues and diversity isn’t one of them. Putting directors in the wrong position is why SMT is in the mess they are in. I can’t wait for SA to clean the mess up.

@2zm no value is created in the pipeline from IT systems. A spreadsheet with a smart person behind it is just as efficient.

@2zm nope you do not design anything. You buy software, install it, make sure it works then walk away and put an outsourced team in charge of maintain it.

This is not google, amazon, or a software company.

Cost management. Full stop.

@2yn @2yn There is more to technology than desktops and licenses, but this is a common misunderstanding of the role TIS plays in our pipeline business. The operational systems we design, maintain, and improve are what enable the pipelines to run safely and efficiently. Every commercial efficiency initiative ultimately depends on whether the technology can translate the idea into operational reality.

In this business, the difference between average and exceptional systems engineering is not measured by IT spend, it is measured by throughput, reliability, energy efficiency, and tens of millions of dollars in value created on the pipeline.

The midstream companies that understand this connection and invest accordingly will outperform those that do not.

@2w4 no one cares whether the mess gets bigger. Enbridge makes money hand over fist despite its inefficiencies.

It’s easier to fire people rather than change for the better. This is capitalism people - if technology doesn’t drive the bottom line, it’s worthless to the company. And 9/10 corporate IT is just managing licenses and costs.

Stop acting like you’re all running google and Microsoft. TIS is not about innovation - it’s about cost management. There is a reason why CIOs are Luddite’s - their roles are about managing the cost of technology. They don’t have vision, strategy or anything else on their mind. They get promoted and bonuses when costs and labour are minimized.

That’s all.

Excel and PowerPoint run this company

@2gd what good will shuffling SMT do? You are implying the right people but in the wrong roles?

As for lack of diversity Bud. Have you seen the BU’s? TIS is a United Nations compared to the leadership teams elsewhere.

Interesting thread.

TIS cuts aren’t done. The plan is to push more technology work into the business, have teams like BS&S/DS&S take over ground that used to belong to BRM and Product. Shut down the lab was the first move.

The CIO has described himself as a Luddite so he’s got to be relying on consultants and “faking it until he makes it”. An organization cannot achieve transformation by reducing the very capabilities required to deliver it.

The irony is thick. Enbridge had a CIO pushing automation, AI, and digital transformation before the business was ready. Now the business is ready, and instead of scaling that capability, we seem to be turning every dirt engineer into an AI hobbyist and calling it innovation.

Everyone wants to build something. We’re handing out hammers and hoping whatever gets built meets the enterprise’s needs. There’s no blueprint, no common architecture, and no clear ownership of the final outcome.

I’ve seen this pattern before. It reminds me of the years leading up to the dot-com bubble - everyone was excited about the technology, everyone was building, and there was a belief that value would naturally emerge from activity. The lesson wasn’t that innovation was wrong; it was that innovation without strategy, governance, and discipline eventually creates a mess to clean up. The mess this time is going to be big.

TIS is the most corrupted team in the company. Nothing against people from India, but boy you can tell the former CIO was from there. He has to clean the house to make it efficient again, probably won’t do anything significant

The CIOs success or failure at changing the culture within TIS and the perception of TIS across Enbridge will largely depend on how he reorgs the department.

The SMT layer needs a major reshuffle, without this nothing changes. Not only are there too many Directors but there are too many of the same age group from the same cultural background. There is no diversity. The pipeline to leadership is dead, lower level leaders have no room to grow, and we don't hire youth. As for EMT, all I'll say is that the good ones are in Canada.

The rumored Sept reorg is supposed to be significant, but as with so many other things TIS, its probably going to be underwhelming. The SMT layer needs a major reshuffle, without this nothing changes.