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Billing and Customer Care - 2008
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T&D Automation - 2008
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Metering/Data Management - 2007
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Generation Technologies - 2007
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Asset Management - 2007
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Outsourcing - 2007
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Billing and Customer Care - 2007
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T&D Automation - 2007
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Generation Technologies - 2006
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Metering/Data Management - 2006
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Asset Management - 2006
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Outsourcing - 2006
With a century of history, NSTAR has its ways of doing business. Yet it is open to innovation. It has moved 40 percent of its information technology operation and maintenance work outside the company. The shift has been executed in the name of efficiency and savings.
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Billing and Customer Care - 2006
Tracking an overnight package is a technical marvel.
Any one of the three major overnight shipping companies can quickly
and accurately tell you where the package is, when it was delivered,
and who signed for it. Talk about leveraging information technology
for improved customer service—these guys have nailed it.
This glaring example of how integrated technologies are deployed
to run a business and make quantum leaps ahead in customer service
are living, breathing proof that it can be done. It is encouraging to see
that many utilities are also moving along this track.
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T&D Automation - 2006
Most people are aware that the electric distribution and transmission
systems are aging and subject to periodic failure—with some
of those failures being rather spectacular. But that’s just one side of
the coin. The other side is that the distribution systems have proven
remarkably reliable in most areas, major outages are rare in most parts
of the country and the industry is not sitting still while these assets
and technologies age.
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Generation Technologies - 2005
Electric generating plants are among the most complex
large-scale engineering projects undertaken by modern society,
especially outside of government-sponsored air/space/science/
military efforts.
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Metering/Data Management - 2005
Many vendors in the automated metering industry claim to have a product that is different than automatic meter reading (AMR). Those claims seem to be an effort to differentiate their products in the marketplace and can be confusing to observers who are unfamiliar with the full range of vendor offerings. In every instance, the vendors are providing an enhanced meter reading technology that offers advantages over manual meter reading.
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Asset Management - 2005
Asset management seems to have as many names as there are vendors promoting it and utilities buying it. That’s because there is no one over-arching definition of the discipline.
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Outsourcing - 2005
Outsourcing major IT systems business processes has been a sensitive matter for most major investor-owned utilities (IOUs) in the United States for some time. Historically, utility executives have been willing to outsource non-core functions, such as tree-trimming, bill printing, or even meter reading occasionally. However, when it came to customer care, work management, outage management, field services, or other central information technology and business processes, they were — with a few notable exceptions — generally reluctant to let anyone
else have access to what they considered core data and competencies. Simply put, it seems the “old-school” utility culture has had a hard time letting things go.
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Billing and Customer Care - 2005
Have you ever wondered how they get those huge
200-300 ton locomotives back on the tracks after a train
wreck? Utilities and the vendors who serve them, especially
CIS vendors, have been struggling with a very similar question for the last three years.
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Utility Systems Automation - 2005
For two decades, utility systems automation has been undergoing a slow but steady transformation. Whereas in the 1980s and 1990s, the most pervasive issues and trends affecting markets were generally rooted in technological changes (e.g., the shift from minicomputers to distributed workstations and a few years later, to ever more powerful desktop personal computers), the most visible drivers today center primarily on business issues.
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