By Jay Cappy, Verizon Business PS Utility Practice Lead – IT Advisory Services

This is part four of the five part blog series that discusses “Is Your Infrastructure Ready for Smart Metering?” You can view parts one, two and three here.

So you already have an IT department that manages your entire critical infrastructure for generation, transmission, distribution, operations, customers, service providers and operations.  So why not just throw in smart metering and let them figure out how to manage it.  It is just more people, servers and applications.  They can figure it out.  But of course, it is much more complicated than that. 

As I said earlier in this series of blogs, smart metering is not a mature solution.  There are a lot of moving parts that have to be integrated into one seamless enterprise architecture that meets the needs of the business.  It is not an easy task and it is not for the weak at heart.  An IT department needs to be ready to take on the challenge to build an organization that will manage both the build and run activities as a part of a smart metering implementation.  Remember we are not supporting a batch activity anymore as it relates to gathering data from your smart meters.  It is a real-time process with a lot of moving parts as a part of the application architecture.

An IT group needs to evaluate its own organization to make sure it is ready to support both the pre and post deployment activities.  It must evaluate the staffing model, the skillsets and the performance measures to support the goals and objectives of smart metering.  The IT group must make sure that training and knowledge transition takes place during both build and run.  A solid transition plan is needed to support the transition from the build to the run organization within IT to make sure the application remains stable and optimized.  And finally, to measure performance, the appropriate SLAs and KPIs need to be in place to achieve the goals and objectives of the company.

In the end, you need to make sure your organization has the right people with the right skillsets that are managed and reviewed to make your transition to smart metering a success. 

In the coming days, we will post the final installment in this series.  We look forward to your views, so please feel free to share them here.

Do you Think Forward?