CIOs in the energy industry have a lot on their plates. They need to secure legacy SCADA systems, manage burgeoning data flows, support more sustainable ways of working, find a way to build better relationships with customers and defend a complex infrastructure against growing cyber threats. In the UK they have to do all this in a climate of economic and political uncertainty which can discourage long term investment.
To date, the energy sector has not embraced the strategic business value of IT in the same way that retailing or financial services have. Too often, IT strategy has been a cost-based procurement decision. As a result, energy companies are still struggling with legacy systems, information locked in separate silos around the organisation and little join up between operational and enterprise IT systems.
So what’s the energy CIO to do? The good news is that where there is the will, there is a way. The technologies that are doing so much to disrupt the status quo, such as cloud computing, mobility, social media and the Internet of Things can also provide the answer to the energy CIO’s many challenges. Even better, with cloud-based delivery and managed services, the CIO can start to build the right infrastructure for the future without the need for major capital spending.
A mobile, more agile workforce
Every energy company wants to build a more agile organisation, to respond faster to incidents that threaten supply. This requires a more efficient way to use field resources. BT has done precisely this in our own business, with great results.
Like energy, the BT network is critical national infrastructure, serving millions of domestic and business customers. We have about 25,000 engineers, of which approximately two-thirds are equipped with Apple iPhones, along with 1700 operational managers who also use the devices. These engineers are fully mobile, with their iPhones acting as an ‘all-in-one field tool’, with a set of apps that enables them to complete 100% of their work using the device.
These engineers are assigned jobs in real time, undertake network tests, complete reports online with customer signature and product bar codes, arrive on site faster using integrated satnav and communicate with colleagues using standard social media technology. Since introducing this streamlined way of working, productivity is up by eight per cent, and our engineers carry out thousands of extra jobs every week. Customers are better informed and engineers more engaged through having a tool they cherish. This is a model that is surely right for the UK’s energy companies.
The Internet of Things
By 2020 there could be more than 50 billion connected devices in the world. Many of these will be digital sensors, replacing traditional telemetry equipment to monitor plant, people and processes. You will no longer need to send an engineer to check physical equipment. Inexpensive sensors on remote devices will send a continuous stream of performance data. The organisation can build up a single view and complete view of operations – perhaps for the first time – and fine tune the network where required. Analytics tools can identify patterns and provide an early warning system for problems. At BT, for example, combining weather data with real-time tracking helps us get the right engineers in place before there’s a problem.
Multichannel customer contact
When there is a problem, then you want to alert customers quickly and let them know when it will be fixed. Traditional call centres rapidly get overloaded when there is a power outage. At Western Power in Australia, when extreme weather disrupted supplies to its million customers, calls shot up from 2,000 to 260,000 a day.
That all changed with a new cloud-based multichannel contact strategy that lets Western Power take the initiative. It now uses social media to alert customers proactively to any issues or critical service updates, which reduces the number of calls it receives. Detailed intelligent voice recognition (IVR) messages automatically update in near real-time with postcode-level details, further cutting the number of enquiries that need to be dealt with by contact centre agents. This frees up staff to deal with more complex enquiries. Finally, the cloud-based contact centre technology is scalable, meaning when spikes in the number of calls do happen, Western Power has the capacity to handle them. As a result, Western Power is now scoring the highest service levels in the history of the organisation.
What makes these sorts of solutions possible is cloud delivery and managed services. Commercial cloud platforms meet the most stringent requirements around data protection and confidentiality. Cloud-based and managed services are ideal for energy companies who may want to scale capacity up and down to cope with seasonal peaks and troughs. Commercial contracts are equally flexible.
In summary, digital technology can help energy companies solve their many conundrums. We have the means: the IT industry has the knowledge, tools and the commercial services that energy companies need to transform their businesses.
By Simon Ormston, head of Utilities at BT Global Services
