FERC vs NERC: A grid control showdown over cyber security

WWW.INTELLIGENTUTILITY.COM /// JULY/AUGUST 2011
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a way that was most effective for them versus how I think
management and the project team might have viewed how
they would use these tools.
And then finally, with deploying a mobile solution
to 3,000 users who are all mobile, constantly changing,
moving around, a lot of tools and technologies need to be
put in place around software management and software
distribution to keep the platform current, secure, and up to
date at all times.
You’ve got to test
each one of your
field activity types
and let it write back
to the system to
see how it’s going
to come across.
JACKIE SCHEEL
SCHEEL I’m from the business side, but sometimes in the
IT world, people say, “How important is testing?” Well, you
can never contradict or even contemplate what the system’s
going to do, so you have to test each one of your scenarios.
You’ve got to test each one of your field activity types and
let it write back to the system to see how it’s going to come
across. A lot of testing is what people seem to want to cut out
of their timelines, and I highly recommend you do not cut
your scenario testing out.
Also, a major factor to having a successful mobile workforce
unit is to get your front line employees engaged and
ask them exactly what it is that they want to see or they don’t
want to see. They’re the ones who are going to be using the
system the most. When we added the meter service agency
on [Ed. Note: JEA has been building its mobile workforce
management platform in stages since 1988], we more than
tripled the number of users. We added 200 users, and I will
tell you one of our lessons learned here was, during the testing,
during the project, we did as much load testing as we
could, but what we did not realize was that most of these
UTILITY MOBILITY
users would all be signing on at the same time. So what we
did realize was that, at about 7 a.m., we had about 400 users
hitting the machine. So we had to go back to our IT department
and add a couple of different servers.
We called it “morning sickness.” I would advise anyone
that, when they do their testing and they do their load testing,
they consider when and how many users will be on the
system at the same time.
SCHACH We spent a lot of time upfront establishing the
right data into the tool, and that’s proven to be just a huge
part of the success for Vectren. We do a lot of work managing
by performance metrics dashboards and what not. If the
data’s not in there correctly in the first place, it’s tough to
get buy-in from your field management. If they just don’t
believe the original data, (then they won’t) believe the data
the system’s now spitting out. We spent so much time early
on that we’ve gotten buy-in, and now we can just move on to
managing the actual work.
Panelists also discussed changing business processes with
the new mobile platform.
BROWNING Another key piece of the project was really
looking at taking our current manual business processes
and looking at how they would be implemented with the
new technology. We certainly didn’t want to take a current
manual process, put technology around it, and still do it the
same way. There was an opportunity to leverage technology
and redesign the process and we tried to do that wherever we
could. A big piece of this was focusing on handoffs between
work groups and ensuring the right data got out to the field
at the right time for each of our users.
SCHACH Meter order management was my largest activity,
and as such, we spent a lot of time trying to figure out
how we could better manage that area. One problem we had
was that our labor contract had originally, some years back,
forced us to treat our various operating centers across our
service territory as individual operating centers—everybody
sort of did their own thing, if you will.
The workers were tied to those areas or depots and they
couldn’t cross boundaries, and it just didn’t make sense. You
could have an emergency where somebody might live literally
across the street and they were not allowed to work that
emergency because of the labor issue.
So once we were able to break that model through contract
discussions, it opened the gamut of flexibility for us to
then focus on this category of work.
And finally, more keys to success, and overall benefits:
SCHACH Since 2004, this cost category saved about $3 million.
So, we’re operating at $3 million less than we would
have then, and obviously that’s a number that’s going to continue
on in the future and hopefully even get better. We’ve