The Technology Demonstration Center By Dave Roggen, IBM When a utility undergoes a major transformation – such as adopting new technologies like advanced metering – the costs and time involved require that the changes are accepted and adopted by each of the three major stakeholder groups: regulators, customers and the utility’s own employees. A technology demonstration center serves as an important tool for promoting acceptance and adoption of new technologies by displaying tangible examples and demonstrating the future customer experience. IBM has developed the technology center development framework as a methodology to efficiently define the strategy and tactics required to develop a technology center that will elicit the desired responses from those key stakeholders.

Using Analytics for Better Mobile Technology Decisions Mobile computing capabilities have been proven to drive business value by providing traveling executives, fi eld workers and customer service personnel with real-time access to customer data. Better and more timely access to information shortens response times, improves accuracy and makes the workforce more productive.

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Using Analytics for Better Mobile Technology Decisions

Improving Call Center Performance Through Process Enhancements
Ed Glister, IBM

About Alcatel-Lucent   Alcatel-Lucent’s vision is to enrich people’s lives by transforming the way the world communicates. Alcatel-Lucent provides solutions that enable service providers, enterprises and governments worldwide to deliver voice, data and video communication services to end users. As a leader in carrier and enterprise IP technologies; fixed, mobile and converged broadband access; applications and services, Alcatel-Lucent offers the end-to-end solutions that enable compelling communications services for people at work, at home and on the move.

Utility Realizes 57 Percent Increase in E-Bill Adoption with Comprehensive ‘Green’ Marketing Campaign
Consolidated Edison Co. of New York (Con Edison) is a regulated utility serving 3.2 million electric customers in New York City and Westchester County. The company recognized that it could realize significant cost savings if more customers would adopt electronic billing, where bills are delivered electronically without a paper version. Eliminating the printing, postage, labor and equipment costs associated with paper billing can result in significant cost savings.

The GridWise Olympic Peninsula Project
The Olympic Peninsula Project consisted of a field demonstration and test of advanced price signal-based control of distributed energy resources (DERs). Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and led by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, the project was part of the Pacific Northwest Grid- Wise Testbed Demonstration.

Analyzing Substation Asset Health Information for Increased Reliability And Return on Investment   Asset Management, Substation Automation, AMI and Intelligent Grid Monitoring are common and growing investments for most utilities today. The foundation for effective execution of these initiatives is built upon the ability to efficiently collect, store, analyze and report information from the rapidly growing number of smart devices and business systems. Timely and automated access to this information is now more than ever helping drive the profitability and success of utilities. Most utilities have made significant investments in modern substation equipment but fail to continuously analyze and interpret the real-time health indicators of these assets. Continued investment in state-of-the-art operational assets will yield little return on investment unless the information can be harvested and interpreted in a meaningful way.

Management and Strategy
Operations
Technology

Becoming an On-Demand Utility
switch is flipped, and there is light. A knob is turned, and there is heat. What industry can be more on demand than energy utilities? Becoming an on-demand utility is not about physics. IBM’s CEO, Sam Palmisano, defines an on-demand enterprise as one “whose business processes integrate end-to-end across the company, and the key partners, suppliers and customers can respond with speed to virtually any customer demand, market opportunity or external threat.”
The Utilities ProjectVolume 6, 5/15/2006