By Jay Cappy, Verizon Business PS Utility Practice Lead – IT Advisory Services
This is part three of the five part blog series that discusses “Is Your Infrastructure Ready for Smart Metering?” You can view parts one and two here.
Build versus run activities
For the processes that support your smart metering initiative, you must break out the build from the run activities. During the build cycle, you must create the services and features that are required by the business that fit within the standards and processes of the company. The solution must be architected for optimum performance and minimal impact from errors or problems with infrastructure or applications. From a run perspective, it must be responsive to business demands, available when needed and can recover with minimal business impact. And finally, it must meet the business service level requirements through the help and support of your IT group and third party vendors.
So how do you do that? For most utility companies that follow ITIL practices it is a simple answer. It is the rigor and control you put around some of the most basic processes within your IT organization. Most of them were listed in Part 2 of this blog, but I will list them again for clarity:
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Availability Management
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Capacity Management
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Change Management
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Configuration Management
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Financial Management
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Incident Management
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IT Service Continuity Management
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Maintenance & Support Management
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Problem Management
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Release Management
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Service Level Management
What is your Risk?
There is a risk, both from a run and build perspective if you are taking short-cuts with these ITIL processes. What is the risk you ask? Well that depends on the circumstances and what you are willing to live with. My advice is to do an operational readiness assessment before you “go live” to determine your risk level across all components within your application architecture. Make sure you are reducing the business impact when things go wrong. Try to prevent incidents from happening in the first place. Leveraging these processes will minimize the risk of disruption of the services needed to provide accurate and timely bills to your customer.
The reason you want to be fanatical with following these processes is that you want to deliver sustained availability of the services that meets the business requirements at an acceptable cost. And if you have problems, it can recover from a major business disruption within the required SLAs of the business.
Stay tuned for part four of this series. In the interim, we look forward to your thoughts. Please feel free to share them here.
This blog was also posted on Think Forward.
As you know, a major aspect of transitioning to Smart Meters is the necessity to manage the Build aspects and the Run aspects in parallel since millions of new Smart Meters can be deployed in a single push. Once the first Smart Meters are live in production, organizations seem to want to manage the Transition under Build until the full target of Smart Meters are completely deployed. Yet by doing so, these organizations tend to follow SDLC methodologies which by nature, limits their responsibility to follow Operational Run processes and best practices.
Those individuals managing Smart Metering projects would be wise to plan for Operational Readiness before the first Smart Meter goes live in Production. By doing so, they can proactively minimize Operational Service and Process disparity when cut-over between Build and Run is achieved. Additionally, by undertaking Parallel responsibility, all Incidents, incident trends and underlying problems can be proactively identified via Root Cause Analysis during the Build/Run parallel timeframe.
Your thoughts about conducting a Current State Analysis of the operational Run processes during the Build process is spot on and probably more important than most who read your blog may know. This is the opportunity for these organizations to tie Build and Run services and processes together to ensure all standard Operational Support and management processes are followed by the Build teams which in turn ensures a successful transition and lays the foundation for Operational Readiness.
Great blog Jay and keep the excellent content coming.
One approach for this is to use the list you mention of run activities during solution design and determine how each activity will be solutioned. For example, for incident management - how will incidents be recognized? Logged? Communicated? Reported on? Who's responsible for these activities? What tools will be used to underpin them?
The results can range from simply reusing capabilities that already exist within the organization to acquiring and building a seperate solution or even sourcing it externally.
Note that run impact to existing operations should also be considered. For example - can the back end billing systems absorb the transaction volumes that a new Smart Metering solution would introduce?