Utilities Tech Outlook Weekly Brief
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IT is becoming a must-invest for utilities, offering new ways to connect customers, assets, employees, and derive actionable intelligence. Knowing these significant IT investments can help utility CIOs transform their business.
FREMONT, CA: The volatility of today’s business environment puts a premium on being agile and flexible. Solving complex business challenges of the present, navigating tomorrow’s technology-driven operating environment, and bringing performance to the next level demands more than a few incremental adjustments. The story is no different for utility enterprises. For utilities, innovation is a top priority—and as always, Information Technology (IT) plays a vital role. IT investments advance utilities’ business goals and work seamlessly with current people and processes. But, it is not a quick sprint for utility CIOs to integrate IT with their business. The strong relationships between IT leaders and CIOs are critical to success. As each utility firm has a unique set of dynamics, regulations, and opportunities to manage, a well-designed and properly-executed IT spending is necessary. Here is a list of significant IT investments utility CIOs can make to ensure the availability of the right resources when needed.
• Infrastructure Management Service
The need to produce and manage utilities in an efficient manner is a priority for utility companies around the world, and it requires innovation at an unprecedented level. For this, complete infrastructure management is needed, which includes day-to-day IT infrastructure operations, project-specific consulting, and design and implementation services. Infrastructure management also offers the flexibility of choosing remote managed services, professional services, or a combination of both. Infrastructure management enables utilities to rationalize IT resource cost, optimize asset utilization, improve uptime, and facilitate system delivery.
• Application Development Service
Applications are becoming more sophisticated and more vital for the daily operations of successful utilities. Application development and implementation services ensure success in the changing times by giving the best possible balance of cost, speed, and quality. A good team of experienced and quality-focused consultants, developers, and application professionals can deliver robust and scalable architectures and decision-support features that bring clarity to the utility enterprises’ application portfolio. Cost-effective integration and development can lead to industry-leading quality, maturity, and service management.
• Data Warehouse and Management Service
Be it supporting customer billing systems or providing the information backbone for sophisticated modeling and development projects, data storage is critical to the success of firms operating in the utility sector. As utility companies are under increased pressure to break down data silos and share information internally, data storage strategy will be essential. A data management service provides a glossary of requirements, terms, and concepts that can be clearly understood and communicated by business and IT professionals, thereby helping to accelerate project scoping, appropriate reporting, data quality, data requirements, and identifying sources of data. Like firms in most industries, utility organizations have to access more data than ever before, which requires services like data warehousing and management that provide a way to synthesize, analyze and integrate data so it can be used to improve operations.
• Security and Network Operation Service
Utility companies are increasingly becoming the targets of sophisticated attacks. As the quantity and types of communication and automation systems deployed by utilities continue to grow, the attack surface also does. As the threat landscape intensifies, there arises a greater need for a coordinated view of all aspects of firms’ security posture, such as how instances may impact and how best to respond to those events. For this, utilities have to invest in security and network operation service, which can improve their security monitoring and defense. The service provides in-depth defense strategies, real-time alerting, and security awareness training. A centralized approach for threat management offers greater situational awareness of security events and threats across the entire enterprise, improving threat analytics, optimizing security resources, and supporting root-cause analyses.
Utilities today are competing to reap bigger rewards by improving processes, increasing the understanding of the customer, empowering employees, boosting security, and mitigating risks, with the help of IT. To cope with these dynamics, utility CIOs will need to expand their role, shifting their primary focus to IT investments for business innovation and flexibility. This call for utility CIOs is sure to found ways to reduce costs and improve performance.
