Smart Grid Reporting
February 10, 2010
I’ve been working in and around the Utility industry for the last 9 years or so. In order to have meaningful conversations with my customers and in order to create solutions that are meaningful to them I subscribe to some industry publications. One such publication is IntelligentUtility. This morning an article caught my eye. In it, Bart Thielbar discusses his mother’s reaction to receiving Smart Grid technology in her home.
For those that haven’t heard, the Smart Grid is the biggest technology investment being made by Utility IT managers. The concept is that your local energy provider will be bringing Business Intelligence into your home. You’ll have a device in say your kitchen that tells you how much electricity you are using when you run your dishwasher. It may even suggest alternate times to run your dishwasher. Ultimately it is believed that you will make better decisions on where to set your thermostat, when to run your washer and dryer and also illuminate you to how much energy is truly being consumed by that hallway chandelier. Additionally, the utility company can also start to do meter reads from their headquarters, thus eliminating meter readers…and also can increase the speed by which new service can be turned on and service can be disconnected for late payments, which will eliminate some service personnel. The idea is that it provides for tremendous cost savings for the utility and potential cost savings to the consumer if behavior is changed. (There are other benefits and pitfalls as well…too numerous to mention.)
Bart’s mother’s response when her son explained all of this to her was very simple, “Can’t we just look around the house and turn off lights that aren’t being used, adjust the thermostat or replace appliances that are less efficient?” Ah yes…having BI for the sake of BI. How many times have you seen an implementation of a dashboard or a new report that was projected to save $$ that just became a rather large paperweight or unused app? If you aren’t planning on using the information to change any behavior then why measure it in the first place?
I’ve seen countless business intelligence efforts fail simply because the users weren’t engaged to create a solution that “fit” the problem. The best BI initiatives are simple, focused, and highly customer centric. Sure the Smart Grid has a lot of benefit and cost savings for the utility, but how many customers are truly going to take those data points and make different decisions in their home? My guess…not as many as you think. As with any technology, it will be a novelty at first and used a lot the month after a high bill. Companies are recognizing this and starting to make adjustments to their new products. So rather than have a consumer look at some guages and dials and decide what to do next, your next dishwasher may be able to tap into the Smart Grid and know when to run the next load of dishes. Perhaps we’ll have a setting that says “Energy Efficient” that will read the rate structure and turn itself on at 3AM rather than run right now.
Is your BI initiative just a bunch of guages and dials? Or is it truly changing the behavior of your users and customers?
– Jodie
If you are interested in other Smart Grid discussions, this blog summarizes some new ideas out there and links to several other sites. http://knowledgeproblem.com/2009/06/30/smart-grid-device-update/
Comments
5 Responses to “Smart Grid Reporting”
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I’ve been thinking about something similar.
Who needs a BI solution to do their job better? Who would have no idea how to turn the BI solution into something useful? Who has all the data they need to do their job and doesn’t need a BI solution?
The first group is your easy win. The second group needs your help and training. I don’t know about the third group. Maybe you tout how quickly business changes and a BI solution would help them adjust with those changes?
Just my two cents
[...] via Smart Grid Solutions Enable BI in the home | TheFutureValueofBusiness.com. [...]
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RT @PatrickRyan03 Smart Grid Reporting http://bit.ly/agXDWt
[...] few weeks ago I posted some thougths on the future of Smart Grid and what it meant to the consumer. In essence, my observation was that it may be BI for BI’s [...]