To the oft-cited, somewhat proverbial utility questions: "Where do I begin my smart grid efforts?" and "After smart meters, what's next ?" Sharon Allan has an answer.
If her name doesn't ring a bell, it should. Allan leads Accenture's North American smart grid services effort and she'll be sharing her industry insights at the Knowledge 2010 conference, Nov. 8-10, in Scottsdale, Arizona. (Other interviews we've published recently with thought leaders who will be attending the upcoming Knowledge 2010 conference include "IT Challenges In the Heartland," "A CIO Perspective on Generation and Regulation," "DMS: Gray Matter of the Grid?" and "Getting a Consumer-centric View with Business Intelligence.")
First, take a deep breath. Then review your business processes with an eye toward the "operational steady state" you envision down the road. "Utilities are at different points on their journey," Allan pointed out to me this week.
Utilities have different points of origin, different legacy systems and are at different points on their capital-intensive "refresh" cycle, she explained. Plus, their future goals must fit their unique business plan for their own service territory, its load and its mix of generation, transmission and distribution assets. (An oft-cited maxim that "one size doesn't fit all" is apt if trite.)
Wherever you are on the modernization continuum, Allan has a few points to make about moving from pilot programs—"pilot-itis" is a phrase bandied about in this industry—to implementation. The goal, in Allan's words:
"Our practice has focused on how to make all the pieces fit an operational steady state, from the pilot mode," she said. "Design for scale," Allan said. "Pilots can go well, you've ascertained that the technology works. But moving from 10,000 devices to three million is different. You need to automate your exception management processes. Because there are always exceptions. "Exceptions are a key issue in large-scale systems," Allan explained. "Stuff happens. So you must make 'exception management' simple and clear." This is particularly true for large, investor-owned utilities, perhaps less so for municipal or cooperative utilities, due to the scale issue, she said.
And when you attempt to scale your grid improvements, assess the impacts on people and processes and understand how to measure and track data against a baseline. "When you begin to automate these processes and they're no longer leveraged to a single department within the utility—it can be leveraged by multiple departments—the people and processes around that have to be looked at, skills reassessed and changed, or you won't realize the full business value," Allan said.
While some utilities have taken these recommended actions, others have approached grid modernization in a piecemeal manner, not thinking through the impact of their decisions from end to end. "The smart grid is truly a 'system of systems,'" Allan said. "That adds complexity. So we're building something that needs integration with live processes. We have existing business processes you cannot break [as you add complexity]." ("All of us would love to see 'plug and play,' but we're not there yet," Allan noted. "The industry's work on standards will take time.")
"When you look at how to achieve an operational steady-state, we think it's important to take the time upfront to review the business processes," Allan explained. "You may not have the capital today to automate your substations or employ solar or prepare for a city of electric vehicles, but we still think it's prudent to envision where you're going to end up.
"This way, as you start your journey to integrate these new systems, you don't design yourself into a corner," she continued. "It takes a little time upfront to determine the impacts on business processes and people and what that means. That will give you working assumptions and guideposts to ensure that you're not scoping and designing too narrowly. As we all know, making changes after the fact is more costly. "This is easier said than done," she acknowledged.
Roadmaps will have many components but Allan emphasized three factors: building for scale, understanding impacts on people and processes and knowing how to measure and track data to extract business value. (The latter, to rephrase it, is the business analytics piece.) On the perennial question—after AMI, what's next?—Allan finds another opportunity to intone the mantra of advance planning for business process impacts. And that's where we'll pick up the thread of Allan's thinking, in tomorrow's second part to this column.
Phil Carson/ Editor-in-chief - Intelligent Utility Daily [email protected] - 303-228-4757
