Energizing Service Management for Utilities: The IBM SAFE Framework

What does service management mean in your industry?

Service Management in Action It's one thing to talk in general about aligning the services you provide with the services your customers demand. It's quite another to accomplish it.

Service management best practices may help, but are in the end abstract by nature, and must be interpreted in context before they can actually be implemented. And certainly, the challenges, operational goals, asset classes, business priorities and many other variables will differ enormously across different industries.

IBM empowers utilities with better service management in the areas that matter most

IBM’s Integrated Service Management (ISM) approach helps by giving organizations the visibility, control and automation over their infrastructures necessary to achieve not just better service management, but a better business outcome.

What’s more, ISM can also empower them to fulfill the possibilities of a smarter planet—to orchestrate the complete range of their assets and processes in such a way as to create more value, more holistically, than ever before.

Imagine smarter buildings, for instance, which monitor energy consumption in real time, and minimize it at peak times through intelligent, policy-based adjustments of key assets. Imagine smarter cities, in which traffic snarls are preemptively reduced through intelligent orchestration of traffic lights and a continual awareness of the locations and statuses of high-priority vehicles such as ambulances.

And to help organizations in specific industries optimize their particular approach to service management, IBM has developed industry-specific service management packages—bundles of modular solutions designed to directly address the challenges that apply in each case.

The IBM Integrated Service Management for Energy and Utilities package, for example, addresses challenges such as these:

Managing and optimizing intelligent power grids
Translating data collected by smart meters into business intelligence and operational change
Improving energy efficiency and empowering consumers who wish to take part in that process
Locking down security on critical infrastructure—for instance, by meeting cyber-security standards for the smart power grid

In October of last year, this package was substantially updated in order to help energy and utilities providers implement the IBM Solution Architecture for Energy and Utilities Framework (SAFE), which addresses:

Asset, device and service monitoring
Asset lifecycle management
Informed decision-making
Improved customer experience
Business Process Automation
Regulatory, risk and compliance management
Security solutions

Over time, by leveraging framework elements that correspond to their challenges, energy and utilities organizations can achieve a superior business outcome while also simplifying their infrastructures and improving their business agility.

Asset, device and service monitoring

How should these organizations best monitor assets, devices and services—and what's the best way to leverage information coming from them? Ideally, they would be able to visualize the availability and performance of different infrastructural elements, and make analysis-driven adjustments, in real time, or as close to it as possible.

That compelling idea is explored by the SAFE Framework in a number of ways. The IBM Tivoli Netcool for Utilities solution, for instance, allows SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) assets and smart electrical grids, and all their elements, to be visualized and monitored under a single pane of glass, including power devices, communications networks, systems and infrastructure and more. When problems in devices on communications networks occur, those problems can be pinpointed in fine detail, spurring a fast and effective response.

And for fast, secure data transactions, the IBM WebSphere DataPower solution is available to distribute data at wire speed, offloading it from the main bus and routing it to trading systems, meter management systems and others; this is particularly attractive in the context of smart grids, which by nature generate large data volumes. Finally, IBM Cognos Now! is a business intelligence tool that analyzes collected data, then reflects the analysis in real-time dashboards—keeping managers apprised of just how near, or far, actual performance is from targets.

Asset lifecycle management

Getting best business value from the complete range of deployed assets, across their full lifecycles, is a major challenge for energy and utilities providers. Here, the goals are to increase asset lifespan and availability, reduce costs and complexity and maintain assets more effectively.

Two key elements of the SAFE framework apply in this context: IBM Maximo Asset Management and IBM FileNet. The first application (or solution) can be used to manage every aspect of an asset's lifecycle, from acquisition to work management to preventative maintenance to safety and disposal issues. Maximo's information is stored in a shared repository, which can easily be leveraged by other applications in the utilities ecosystem to achieve particular business goals.

The second solution, FileNet, manages documents used to operate or maintain assets, such as manuals, drawings and procedures, that may be needed to improve business processes or enhance collaboration.

Furthermore, these solutions are integrated. In combination, they can help orchestrate knowledge flow between asset management and enterprise content management—optimizing asset performance and lifespan, increasing operations productivity and increasing the business value of all asset-dependent services.

Informed decision-making

For both consumers and utilities providers, it's clearly beneficial to be able to make decisions in an informed and quantified way. Consumers, for instance, may seek to reduce costs by buying utilities when they are cheapest, or generate their own power and sell it back to the grid. Utilities, on the other hand, need ways to predict demand and supply more accurately, and remotely detect where assets are damaged so as to dispatch work crews efficiently.

Both forms of decision-making come into play within the SAFE framework. For example:

IBM WebSphere Events makes it possible to detect, evaluate and correlate events, then take logical action based on them. Imagine a neighborhood with a power outage; once events related to the outage are obtained, the solution can correlate them to appropriate events, which are carried out by outage management systems (used by utilities) and customer care managers (to alert affected customers of the issue).
IBM Cognos offerings deliver a complete range of business intelligence capabilities, from reporting to analysis to color-coded, KPI-driven performance dashboards and scorecards.
The IBM Information Management Portfolio is a foundation of information designed to drive cross-domain services and collaboration; it can integrate disparate data and systems, and generate actionable insights to project or task stakeholders.
IBM iLog enables optimized decision-making for utilities operation and planning in areas such as fuel supply and transport processes, power system resource planning and crew and maintenance scheduling.

Improved customer experience

A critical part of effective service management lies in establishing what customers experience, and helping them communicate and interact, so that over time, services can be modified to more closely align with customer needs. And for energy and utilities providers, that implies new mechanisms through which customers can obtain more information about, and more control over, how they use energy.

Three key solutions in the SAFE framework can help fulfill these goals. IBM WebSphere Portal serves as a single point of personalized interaction—a straightforward interface, linking applications, content and processes, designed to enable users to track many aspects of their energy utilization. IBM Lotus Connections helps users communicate with each other via networks, wikis, communities, blogs and other forms of interaction. And when the user experience is available in as many contexts as possible, obviously its value is multiplied. For this reason, SAFE also includes IBM Lotus Expediter, to extend the Web experience across both wired and wireless networks.

Business Process Automation

How can utilities providers optimize their business processes? That's a very broad question, but in many cases, it is possible to automate them—leading to far higher procedural consistency, far lower costs and an accelerated time-to-market of new offerings.

In the SAFE framework, this area is addressed via four WebSphere offerings, which correlate to sequential stages in a process's lifecycle:

IBM WebSphere Modeler. This solution models and optimizes utility business processes—shaping them prior to rollout.
IBM WebSphere Process Server. This solution actually deploys and executes those processes in the infrastructure.
IBM WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus. Using this offering, applications and services involved in a process can be integrated using a shared, flexible connectivity structure.
IBM WebSphere Message Broker. This tool distributes and shares data in real time, keeping key stakeholders (including, possibly, customers) on top of relevant information.

Together, these offerings can also play a part in a SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture), which maximizes reuse of established solutions or services by making them available to any number of business processes—a much superior approach to repeatedly reinventing the technology wheel.

The results? More integrated overall operations and management, enhanced asset utilization (through such functions as load-balancing) and increased customer awareness as well, thanks to simplified access to timely information.

Regulatory, risk and compliance management

Government regulations require complete and demonstrable compliance. Achieving that compliance is, for energy and utilities providers, not always an easy matter—in part because of the tremendous volume of data and documents that may be involved.

Toward helping these organizations achieve compliance and demonstrate it in an audit, IBM includes several solutions in the SAFE framework. IBM FileNet—already discussed in the context of asset lifecycle management—can help them capture, manage, store, preserve and deliver myriad document types and content classes. The included change control and security features help fulfill the terms of government regulations that specify how information should be managed and accessed.

Also useful in the event of an audit is IBM Tivoli Compliance Insight Manager, which can generate many types of compliance reports from a library, even customizing them to serve particular purposes. This tool also includes a real-time executive dashboard that reflects user activity against security policies, translating into easy visibility of compliance posture at any given time.

Finally, IBM iLog Supply Chain Activations can support green energy management goals (a growing element of government regulations going forward) via proven, standardized technologies and processes.

Security solutions

As energy and utilities assets (such as electrical grids and meters) become smarter, and join the IP network, they also become more attractive targets to hackers, terrorists and malware—and the consequences in the event of a security breach in this context could conceivably be catastrophic.

As a result, IBM has drawn heavily from its deep and rich portfolio of enterprise-class security solutions in creating the SAFE framework. Among others, these include

IBM Tivoli Access Manager, which locks applications and files (including SCADA elements) against unauthorized access
IBM Tivoli Identity Manager, which leverages a strict policy mechanism to govern both user identities and the privileges that go with them
IBM Tivoli Security Information and Event Manager, which continually monitors the infrastructure for security violations, aggregates and analyses security logs to uncover possible breaches and establishes a quantified compliance posture on demand via monitoring, assessment and reporting functions.

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