Case study

    Fueling transformation: St1’s journey to a scalable, AI-ready data landscape

    As a Nordic energy transition company St1 accelerated its shift toward CO₂-aware energy and entirely new lines of business, its legacy data platform became a growing bottleneck - it was too slow and rigid to support real-time insights and AI-driven innovation. We helped St1 rebuild its data foundation into a scalable, domain-driven platform that now powers real-time decision-making and unlocks new business use cases, positioning the company for an AI-ready future.

    Service

    Data and AI

    Industry

    Energy and Resources

    St1’s vision is to be the leading producer and seller of CO2-aware energy. The company believes in transparency, fairness, sustainability, and equal opportunities. Over the past decade, St1 has invested boldly in renewable energy projects, including geothermal wells research in Otaniemi, wind power, and renewable fuels. Johannes Heikkinen, Head of Architecture, Data & Technology at St1, describes the strategic change St1 is embracing:

    “Our focus has moved from efficient operations of the traditional oil products’ value chain to building three entirely new value chains. These include hydrotreated vegetable oil (HVO) and sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), biogas, and electric vehicle charging.”

    With this business transformation ongoing, the Business Technology unit at St1 has also moved beyond its traditional IT role to become a partner and enabler of core business processes. To align technology and data with the new value chains’ needs, St1 has adopted a business-domain-driven model for IT development and delivery.

    Building the foundation: partnership and platform

    A few years ago, St1 recognized that its existing data platform, along with its operating and governance models, were hindering the business transformation. While the platform continued to function, it had become increasingly slow and expensive to scale. Several components were reaching the end of life and implementing new use cases - such as those requiring real-time data and APIs - provided challenging. St1’s new direction required a modern platform designed to handle rapidly growing data demands and ensure AI readiness, all underpinned by a scalable governance and operating model fit for the future.

     

    St1 expanded its existing partnership with Nortal to include data management, appointing Ergin Tuganay as Lead Data Architect to help renew its data foundation.

     

    “From the start, our approach hasn't been about renewing only technology to match future needs, but to build an operating and governance model that scales with growing business needs. Also, in the era of ever-accelerating technical evolution and AI, both the platform operating and governance models are designed to support flexibility and future evolution.”

    Working together, St1 and Nortal designed and built the Data & Analytics Platform (DAAP). Their goal was to iteratively develop a platform, along with supporting governance and operating models. that would adapt and scale to the diverse needs of different domains and value streams, both now and in the future. The platform and its governance framework draw inspiration from data mesh principles, which have been pragmatically tailored to meet St1’s unique requirements rather than applied in a purely theoretical way. Technically, the platform is built on Microsoft Azure, Databricks, and Power BI. It supports both batch and streaming data, handles structured and unstructured formats, and is ready for AI-driven use cases.

    Ergin Tuganay, Head of Data & AI at Nortal Finland

    “From the start, our approach hasn't been about renewing only technology to match future needs, but to build an operating and governance model that scales with growing business needs."

    From data to business value

    "While part of the work is migrating existing data warehouse assets into the new platform, the new platform has also enabled St1 to realize valuable data use cases that were not possible before. For example, we can now identify high-value and at-risk customers in real time. This allows us to track segment changes and empowers our marketing and sales teams to personalize communication and offers,” explains Johannes Heikkinen from St1.

     

    With the new data platform in place, St1’s customer service can also serve customers based on real-time transaction data.

     

    “The new solution for the customer support service significantly improves transparency and speeds up problem resolution.” Nortal’s Tuganay notes and continues:

     

    “I see the most interesting opportunities for St1’s future in the platform’s abilities to provide data as a product for various kinds of use cases from reporting and business intelligence, digital applications, or advanced analytics and AI-powered applications.”

    Right balance between control and empowerment

    St1 and Nortal invested significant effort into creating a clear, well-defined governance and operating model for the new data platform. For example, the teams, roles, documentation, and even role-specific onboarding and training plans were pre-defined. Heikkinen notes that, at earlier stages of the project, this level of thoroughness was even somewhat overwhelming. However, it has recently started to pay off:

    “Now that the platform foundation is in place, and the organizational change is slowly catching up, we really see the value of our well-thought-out governance model.”

    One of the key learnings from the project, according to Heikkinen, was the important of change management.

    “Change management would always deserve more focus than it gets. We had the correct approach, coming from both ends: from data management and platform, and from leadership and business needs.”

    However, as Heikkinen notes, it has required substantial work and several incremental steps to bring these two together. Now, St1 is beginning to see its business domains recognize the platform's value through real business cases. They are now actively ideating use cases for the new data platform and the real-time insights it generates, and the AI capabilities it unlocks.

    Both Heikkinen and Tuganay emphasize that, since different business domains vary in their maturity, support cannot be “one size fits all.” Instead, multiple modes of enablement are necessary to address a range of needs.

    Johannes Heikkinen, Head of Architecture, Data and Technology, St1

    “From the start, Nortal has differentiated itself by not just selling us a bunch of developers but offering a team that understands the relevant business context and processes."

    When value leads, sales will follow

    Since 2021, St1 and Nortal have worked as one team with shared goals. Johannes Heikkinen sums up the partnership:

     

    “From the start, Nortal has differentiated itself by not just selling us a bunch of developers but offering a team that understands the relevant business context and processes. They have also convinced us with the professional approach of not being too eager to sell.”

     

    He then smiles and concludes:

     

    “At the end, the best sales pitch is when the partner produces something that brings real business value.”

    Listen and watch the full story

    Learn more about this project by watching the keynote by Johannes and Ergin, recorded at Nortal’s Partner Event during Helsinki Data Week 2025.

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