When will I get access to my online account?

I have lodged a complaint with the Energy Ombudsman -www.energyombudsman.org

Let’s put this into a different angle and step into my world for a second. As the Forum Moderators know, my background is in IT and Cybersecurity. This stuff is right up my street.

Would you rather have a rapid migration focused on speed - but then spend forever fixing all the car crashes - or a slower migration focused on quality where everything is tested and verified before anything gets shifted?

British Gas went for speed.

OVO went for quality.

I ALWAYS go for quality wherever possible.

Which would you pick? Please think about this very carefully before answering. Please bear in mind that the legacy Apollo billing system was falling apart anyway and keeping it going could have been even more detrimental than just turning it off.

I agree with quality over speed.
 

The issues I have are:

1. When the Directors of OVO took the decision to suspend online access they also made a decision not to communicate their decision to customers who only found out when they attempted to log on. 
2. When the Directors knew that online access would not be restored at the end of the year they made a decision not to inform customers.
3. A decision was then taken by the Directors to inform customers who were asking about their online access that it would be restored in Q1 2024. 
4. A decision was taken by the Directors this week to inform those customers who were told that their online access would be restored in Q1 that there is now no date when their online access will be restored. 

The Board of Directors of OVO Energy need to issue a public statement explaining their decisions and make a commitment to continually proactively inform customers when their online access will be restored. 

I think it’s very unlikely that this was a CEO, COO, CTO, CIO or even a CISO decision. This kind of thing hardly ever falls under the remit of anyone in the C-Suite. It’s more likely to have been Team Leader or Head of Department level stuff.

Some of the questions I ask are designed to reveal more information than the question itself may appear to ask for. This is by design because it sometimes allows me to extract information that’s not obvious at first and dig into the details. Proves rather useful in some of my other roles. The last one I asked you was one of that type.

It is unlikely the C-Suite would have been directly monitoring progress nor calling the shots.

Sometimes, you also have to pull the plug sooner than you want to. Apollo was falling apart and OVO was struggling for many years with it being unreliable, which was one of the big reasons why Orion is scratch built in-house by OVO’s sister company Kaluza - it gives OVO Group full control over the code rather than relying on some random third-party and trusting their word.

There is also the factor of the SSE to OVO Migration protect - which for complicated legal reasons HAD to be done by the end of 31st December 2023 without exception, which was when the licensing agreement to use the SSE name and branding expired. The Apollo to Orion Migration has no such legally binding condition attached to it and ultimately planned schedules are just predictions - not hard and fast rules.

I performed an email migration a few months ago for the media company I’m part of. Two different source systems with the destination being Google Workspace. Pretty easy to do, one was from Zoho Mail, the other my web server. I started with my web server first as that was the more crucial one, simply had to set up the Google Workspace Data Migration Service tool, plug in a few details and press go… And then waited six hours for the biggest of the 10 accounts to migrate automatically. Easy! I was even able to add more accounts on the fly - just plugging in the details for each account and hit add, which kicked off the ingest for those ones too without interrupting any others.

Zoho… Was an absolute nightmare, despite being just two accounts. Long story short, I had to hack the super admin account, flip super admin to me and then run migration. For just two users, it took 12 hours for far less mail. And I could only run the job for one migration source at a time.

The process for doing Apollo to Orion is just like that… Except multiplied by 1+ million or so accounts, except far more complicated, far more critical and (for the most part) far more automated.

I think progress will speed up from here and the Forum Volunteers - myself included - will be making sure we get timely progress updates whenever possible.

Apollo is gone, so you can’t ask to have your online access to that turned back on because there’ll be nothing to link it to.

Thank you for explaining in detail the process of migrating Apollo to Orion.

If you are correct that the decision to suspend online access for 1+ million customers for an indefinite period of time was not approved by the Board and the Board are unaware of the current situation then Stephen Fitzpatrick, Founder, Raman Bhatia, CEO or Christina Scott, CTO, will be able to confirm this in a statement along with an apology.

More like 1,000 left by the time it was turned off. Over 99% of accounts were already off of Apollo by the time OVO had to pull the plug.

Online access wasn’t suspended per se - the entire billing system was turned off.

I am afraid Blasoise186, you are showing a complete lack of understanding of dealing with a large number of customers and also data systems. For a company as large as OVO with 1 million legacy customers to just cut them off without board level knowledge is unforgiveable. Also your comments about only 1000 customers being left should mean that the system designed to handle 1 million should have no problem being run on until those 1000 were transferred to the new system. You also show no understanding of databases compared to email systems. A simple email with just 1 word will be much larger than 10 years worth of one customer every month meter readings with price data. Ovo’s legacy system was not great, especially if you have a 3 phase installation in 1 house when it estimated that I was going to use the same as 3 houses so every 6 months, I had to phone in to stop the system trebling my direct debit but to just cut me off without warning from my account is absolutely out of order. I have also not received a bill since Oct 2023 so I presume there isn’t even an (x3) estimated reading system in operation.

I have 24 years of IT experience and a Level 5 BTEC Higher National Diploma in Computing and Systems Development. I’m more than qualified to know about databases. It took me four years to achieve that alone as I did a two year Level 3 BTEC National Diploma in IT first. Likewise, I have three and a half years of experience on this forum.

In case you’re interested, I updated this comment by using an SQL Script hooked up to CKEditor 4 to modify the forum database. It’s actually quite easy to do too.

I’m also capable of many things when it comes to IT stuff that I don’t talk about for legal reasons. I’m being genuinely honest about that - even if I wanted to, I can’t. All I can say is that I’ve proven my skills to OVO at least once and my doing so was highly appreciated. Likewise, there are also other companies who have thanked me for my assistance. In that particular case, both companies involved reacted positively to my intervention.

But I can tell you now - the Apollo database almost certainly held FAR more data for each account than just “one customer meter reading a month and price data”. It’d have held way more than that.

I also already mentioned it clearly that there weren’t many accounts still on Apollo when that system was turned off. It’s quite possible those were the ones that were either very badly corrupted by Apollo itself and/or had requirements that haven’t yet been added to Orion. Those are very likely reasons why you’re not back up yet but are just my personal thoughts.

It is quite possible your account is on a Billing Hold or Billing Suspension, which is designed to prevent corruption from sending out dodgy bills. Trust me, it’s better that way and is arguably for the best. The last thing you want is corrupted bills being generated, and suspending them prevents that.

We - as the Forum Volunteers - normally recommend in such cases that you either continue making payments as normal, OR put the money aside so you can quickly clear the next bill and entire outstanding balance in one go once billing gets resumed on your account.

But alas, it appears that my advice isn’t getting through and never will, so if you really want to contact the CEO that badly, then so be it. Step this way and you can reach his team. I will advise however, that the CEO himself probably won’t be the one replying.

If you look further down… You’ll see there’s more to that page than first meets the eye.

I use macros programmed into my mouse for certain repetitive tasks on this forum. As it happens, one of them is set to paste in the feedback page and hyperlink it in one go by triggering a macro. It’s not worth my time to customise it for every possibility under the sun and plugging in that page is more useful than plugging in email addresses directly.

Given my activity levels on this forum, automation tools such as macros save me an awful lot of time. Multiply that by several thousand comments and it soon adds up.

And yes, I have seen 5 ¼ floppy disks. I never used them much as I more often used 3 ½ inch disks instead, but I do know about both types. And yes, I have used DOS as well in the past.

Blastoise186 I don’t question your technical expertise but your replies fail to acknowledge that OVO suspended my online access without any prior notification and have failed on multiple occasions to keep me informed when my online access will be restored. 

The Board of OVO should accept responsibility for their failure to communicate with customers.