Convergys’ Kit Hagen on the Importance of Systems Flexibility
I recently had the opportunity to chat with Kit Hagen, who serves as global director of utilities at Convergys and will be attending Energy Central's Knowledge 2010 conference, Nov. 8-10, in Scottsdale, Arizona. Here are a few excerpts of that conversation.
Intelligent Utility: One of the things I continually hear in the marketplace is the need for flexibility in billing systems. Why is that important?
Hagen: It's important because the industry is, depending on who you talk to, either on the cusp of or in the very first few steps of a pretty significant paradigm shift. The industry was probably light in terms of its data intensity; now it's going to grow exponentially. Generally it's more than just the data shift - it is a massive paradigm shift that also includes changes to the way utilities are going to interact with their customers.
Utilities are moving to a world where they're really focusing on an actual customer and potentially understanding that there are items beyond the wall of that premise that they may need to engage with. Flexibility comes in because we are in the infancy of this paradigm shift, so there's still a lot yet to be determined - you're going to need to be able to react quickly as new opportunities come up.
As new functional elements get added into the grid, and as things become more competitive in certain areas, you have to have that flexibility to be able to respond. But you also have to have the flexibility to help you de-risk the entire activity. Utilities are making billion dollar bets - even more in some cases - in infrastructure investment to enable smart grid. Do you really want to tack on an end-to-end CIS replacement for a couple hundred million dollars? Or do you want to look at ways that you can maybe reduce your exposure to that investment and give yourself flexibility in the way you deploy that system, or the modules that you deploy with that system? The idea of flexibility has many different levels to it. It's not only system flexibility, but it's deployment flexibility, component flexibility.
Intelligent Utility: Earlier this summer Convergys announced a partnership with Echelon. What is the significance of your partnership?
Hagen: The significance of that partnership and the significance of some other partnerships that you'll probably see announced very shortly is an alignment of likeminded partners. We come from and we play in a very real time world. So what we look for in the utility space are partners and entities that have the same perspective - that the data is very important; that at some level it is actually an asset that the utility produces. It can be monetized. W look for partners that have the ability to deliver real time data, high speed data, at scale - and understand the importance of that data. And that's really part of the core linkage between Convergys and Echelon - that we both have that perspective.
We also have a perspective that we are components of an ecosystem - Convergys alone is not the end-to-end smart grid solution. But that ecosystem has to be aligned on core philosophical elements - things like the frequency of the data that you collect, the way you handle that data, and the fact that the data is best leveraged as part of a 2-way network infrastructure - going both to the meter and coming from the meter. That data, turned into customer insights, must be engaged with elements behind the meter such as HAN devices and in home displays, and there is going to be a focus on taking that data and engaging the customer with it. That's really what excites us about our Echelon partnership - that focus on the importance of the data and delivering it in a high-speed, high scale, timely fashion. That way, it can be immediately usable by the utility and the end customer in new and unique ways, for example as part of real-time pricing or new products and services that drive revenue for the utility.
Christopher Perdue
Vice President, Sierra Energy Group
cperdue@energycentral.com
310.471.7396
