SOA Requirements for Utilities: What They Really Need

Let us examine the SOA requirements of utilities and energy companies: what do these firms really need -- and why? Utilities and utility leadership are faced now with a host of concerns based on regulation and other situations in the business environments in which they operate. Many of these are new concerns -- concerns the industry didn't have to cope with in the past.

SOA Requirements: Silos Disperse and Obscure Needed Information

One of the top SOA requirements for utilities is related to the widely dispersed state today of corporate data -- the collection and integration of which is necessary for the leadership to make effective decisions. Over time, like many large businesses, utilities developed and became dependent upon silos of information -- which proliferated throughout their IT systems.

In this scenario, the utility's leadership typically struggles to obtain usable information about:

• Regulation and legislation
• Finance
• Performance, related to:
  • Employees
  • Systems
  • Customers
  • Management
  • Training
• Work force issues, related to:
  • Regulated customers
  • Operations
  • Financial elements

SOA Requirements Influenced by Business, Economic, Infrastructure Challenges

Other SOA requirements center around functional elements and concerns like: operations, purchase power, generation, distribution grids and transmission. It should be noted here that utilities must now support a transmission system that has been described by one utility CIO as a "back roads system": today's transmission system was never designed to serve the entire nation. And yet it is being forced to do just that today. A lot of the distribution grid and the transmission grid is also aging. The grid is limited in its ability to place new transmission lines.

In addition (long before they began to contemplate their SOA requirements), utilities discovered they had to work effectively with "customers"; they had to learn over the last 10 or 15 years to think about private businesses and homeowners as "customers" -- instead of the former quasi-government "ratepayer". This change in philosophical outlook had a major impact on business processes and customer-service systems. Adding to this change now are the important financial consequences of deregulation and competition.

Finally, there is the new Federal regulation that has come to the industry as a result of the Enron scandal. This regulation has created extensive challenges, both economic and systemic, For utilities and energy firms. Meeting the specified reporting requirements is costly -- both because of the required IT upgrades to do so and because of the ongoing need to "feed the beast" with data.

A Long Way to Go to Deliver on SOA Requirements

The IT systems in place within utilities and energy firms now generate a tremendous amount of data. But converting that data into information -- and having it available in real time or near-real time -- so it can reach the leadership in a useful form is the true goal of utility-industry IT departments. It's at the top of the SOA requirements they really need and want. Unfortunately, most of these IT departments are a considerable distance from achieving that goal at this moment in time. But there are some utility-industry examples of incremental success ...

For More Information

How do the SOA requirements of energy and utility companies relate to those of other large, distributed organizations? Find out more: download the free webinar, Will SOA Benefit The Energy & Utility Industry?