BI - Smart Utilities' Light Bulb

MSPowerUtilities — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 23:27:00 GMT

The software industry is continually challenged by the need to convert data into useable information and several years ago that challenge took shape in the form of dashboards – graphical representations of key information that was being generated by various software programs.

In essence, the dashboards were bottom line indicators of performance on the key metrics that top executives considered valuable and important to their overall management of the company.Heretofore those dashboards were mostly targeted at top executives who needed summaries and forewarnings of potential underlying business problems.

The people actually running the various components of the business weren’t always included in the dashboarding effort, leaving them on their own for creating information relevant to their operational component.

Dashboarding has also typically been a monthly exercise to pull together key metrics, so the potential for near realtime information to manage the business has not existed.Today’s software solutions offer broader opportunities for the utilization of dashboards throughout companies, to have the effect of increasing overall business IQ.

For utility companies, this broader utilization comes with some difficulty because of the way that information is spread throughout the organization. But there is growing realization that spreading the use of dashboards, from the accounting and senior management offices to everyone – civil and electrical engineers, technicians, planners, operations, customer service representatives, safety officers and others – empowers excellence and improved performance throughout the organization.

It’s my hope you’ll enjoy learning more about the democratization of Business Intelligence efforts throughout the enterprise. The white paper includes case study examples of Italy’s Edipower and Hong Kong’s CPL Group, along with a number of views from analysts at Gartner and IDC Energy Insight and consultants at Accenture. – Larry Cochrane

Too Much Data, So Little Information

MSPowerUtilities — Sat, 17 May 2008 03:52:00 GMT

In terms of industries that that are rich in data rich and poor in information, Utilities and Power Companies are probably at the top of the list.

That doesn’t need to be the case any longer.

I remember about 4 years ago asking Rick Nicholson of IDC Energy Insights (Meta Group at that time) at an internal Microsoft meeting about his view on the low hanging opportunities for Utilities in terms of improving their operations. His answer: Business Intelligence, converting data to information.

It has taken a while but over the past couple of years we have seen an explosion of BI/EPM in the industry. Take a look at these case studies on the topic for Power Generation and Trading.

Some of the recent work that is very interesting is the work that Enspiria Solutions (http://www.enspiria.com/) is doing around Business Intelligence.

They have what they call a spatially-enabled business intelligence framework. It allows customers to take data from disparate sources and view their assets, vegetation-tree management, track outages, maintenance and integrate all of this under a SOA environment with collaboration and business intelligence. In a nut shell it introduces a spatially enabled business intelligence environment for asset managers, leveraging utility information from systems such as ESRI and OSIsoft.

It’s pretty cool stuff that will help Utilities drive high performance through increased operational efficiencies. Plus it should help with regulatory compliance and increase business transparency issues. – Jon Arnold

Microsoft Power and Utilities Blog : Business Intelligence

BI - Smart Utilities' Light Bulb

Too Much Data, So Little Information