EnergyBiz - January/February 2008 - (Page 38) LeaDeRshIP RoUnDtaBLes with the type of business information that they will need to justify, quantify and place all this anticipated spending? harknEss In addition to making strides in business analytics, we’ve developed a more capabilities around portfolio management to allow the different business units to actually manage a made as to what level of investment we want to make. After that we figure out how much we want to invest in facilities and IT, and we have a plan. It’s built into our culture now that we have to invest in maintenance of IT, similar to what we do with our distribution network. EnErgyBiz There’s a great deal of emphasis now being placed on collecting real-time data from the grid. How much progress are you making? BrEMEr We have a fairly robust data gathering system. We were an early adapter of AMR and have more than a million meters automated. We have those built into our outage-management systems and our work-management systems. What we don’t have at this point is the communication back to the device from a load controller or management perspective. With the smart grid and AMI versus AMR getting more and more attention and the carbon issues and conservation in general, this is an area that is going to accelerate everybody’s focus including ours. arnET T The challenge I’ll have is getting my business intelligence team to get outside of their comfort zone in the finance and customer service area and go across the street to the operations data and start pulling some of that real-time data and thinking outside the box. They need to work with that group so we can really start doing some good analytics and build a quality data warehouse to mine that data. We have a fairly robust datagathering system. lot of their portfolio – where Dave Harkness they’re going to go. That’s not just tracking current-year activities, but also looking at spending from a future perspective. We’ve stepped up and done a better job of projecting what our total spend is going to be, what that business value will be. There’s also been a lot of work around our governance processes so that the corporation can make better technology decisions going forward. ziMOn From a capital allocations standpoint, we have a five-year capital plan, which breaks down into a lot more detail. It includes the big expenditures in the transmission and distribution infrastructure. We determine what that need is, and that’s based on fairly sophisticated risk-based analysis. We look at history of the performance of the various components and then a decision is Dealing with the new generation constraints EnErgyBiz What kind of IT challenge does distributed generation present? BrEMEr I don’t know if that’s going to be a problem or not. I guess it will depend on who is controlling the distributed generation, where it is, how it plays into the RTO market and what kind of information is needed back and forth. Some of the issues associated with netting out your metering, your revenue and expenses are things that our systems today don’t do a real good job managing. So we’ll have to come to grips with that as an issue. ziMOn It’s going to be a significant impact, depending on how it plays out. We’re seeing significant growth in distributed genera- 38 E n E rgyB i z January/February 2008
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