Carbon Emission Management: Technology Systems Can Improve Customer Satisfaction and Employee Retention

MSPowerUtilities — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 00:45:00 GMT

Utility executives know implicitly that consumers judge their company by the amount and meaningfulness of the Utilities' community outreach and conservation programs. What’s been difficult to measure is just how much value is created by such efforts and thus how much companies should invest in them given all the competing interests for scarce investment funds.

Earlier in the year a J.D. Powers and Associates study found that “approximately 37 percent of business customers report being aware of their utility’s energy conservation and efficiency programs [and that] customer awareness of a utility’s community outreach or conservation activities raised overall satisfaction by as much as 108 index points in the 2008 study.”

Energy conservation, efficiency programs and other community outreach programs do pay off.

Around the corner, utilities will need to go beyond conservation and efficiency and begin informing their publics about what they’re doing in their day-to-day operations to manage carbon emissions. That is increasingly the topic of the day. Further, since companies are going to be making significant investments in their carbon emission management technologies they should make the most of them.

American Electric Power is an example of a utility taking a leadership role in sustainability and the use of information technology to manage carbon emissions. The company implemented a compliance system that provides consistency of reporting, automates the reporting process, documents the compliance process, is accessible to all personnel needing access to information, and keeps the multiple and detailed reporting requirements for compliance across all the jurisdictions where AEP operates up to date. Companies can’t manage what they can’t measure and having the right systems in place is achieving that goal for AEP.

According to one executive, "It is important that all employees of AEP see the overall picture, and that the picture is consistent and allows them to make progress against the goals that the company is committed to." AEP will probably reap additional benefit from their effort, in the form of increased employee retention, as today’s workers are very concerned about their employers’ sense of corporate social responsibility. (BTW, there’s your next study topic, JD Powers!)

The AEP story is an interesting one as it combines SaaS with internal software to form what we call Software-plus-Services which is the Microsoft approach for the next generation of computing. It is a confluence of multiple industry phenomena including SaaS, SOA, and Web 2.0. We think this approach reflects real world business processes as it is more compelling than just software OR service only approaches. It brings together the best of cloud-based services and the software that resides on a world of devices…We think this makes the most sense for your business.

We sponsored an IDC Energy Insights white paper on the AEP S+S story. Take a look at. - Larry Cochrane.

Geospatial Systems on Steroids

MSPowerUtilities — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 22:10:00 GMT

Utilities and other companies are no strangers to geographic information system technology as it is part of their resource management, asset management, environmental impact assessment and emergency planning and response operations. Utilities have been using geospatial systems for years and one of the first industries to adopt the technology.

As we look around at global utility industry trends we see many companies combining traditional utility GIS systems with new web based solutions that offer high-resolution satellite and aerial imagery, dramatically faster response times, and easy integration with data sets. In some cases we are seeing very sophisticated “mashing up” of information from many different sources into new ways that leverage data visualization and location intelligence, all around composite applications.

Probably the best example is some of the work that IDV solutions (http://www.idvsolutions.com/) is doing using Virtual Earth and SharePoint in utilities and oil and gas. I strongly recommend your gaining a stronger understanding of this revolutionary technology by checking out our BP case study at: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2007/mar07/03-07crisisresponse.mspx. Make sure you view the video. - Jon

Microsoft Power and Utilities Blog : microsoft

Carbon Emission Management: Technology Systems Can Improve Customer Satisfaction and Employee Retention

Geospatial Systems on Steroids