Mobility for UtilitiesMobility for Utilities

Device form factors need to be more rugged than an iPad, but there's no doubt that mobility is the critical issue for public utilities.

Gary's post today about the Intel Studybook reminded me about a conversation I had a couple of weeks ago with Scott Johanning, who's manager of telecommunications for We Energies, the major power supplier for southesastern Wisconsin and areas up through the Upper Penninsula of Michigan. I was talking with Scott about the upcoming annual education conference of the WTA, the telecom association for Wisconsin. That meeting's going to focus heavily on the increasing importance of mobility, which happens to be something that Scott and We Energies are also grappling with.

One thing that became clear in talking with Scott was that his major areas of concern aren't the core call-control technology--i.e., whether to migrate legacy TDM to IP--but to allocate always-limited resources into areas that have an immediate effect on the business. "We're very much traditional," sticking with digital phones, some VOIP, and of course still some analog trunks. Users haven't expressed a strong need for VOIP, he said.

One area he's looking at closely is the contact center--customer contact always being a critical area for public utilities. Scott is looking for ways to incorporate social and other new media into his existing voice contact center, for all the reasons that so many other enterprises are doing so.

But the other major area where users are clamoring for more and better technology, and where Scott is putting his energies, is in mobility--again, a perennial concern for a public utility with a large, widely-dispersed, highly mobile field force.

Scott is very interested in giving tablets to his field workers, at the same time that he's exploring machine-to-machine (M2M) applications that could integrate meter reading, telemetry and service/repair applications with communications. "I forsee that there’ll be tablets deployed," he told me--but not until there are widely-available, ruggedized models. We didn't talk specifically about the Intel Studybook that Gary writes about, but this is clearly closer to the idea for a utility worker than an iPad or other general-purpose tablet.

Even without ruggedized tablets, We Energies is already as caught up in the mobility revolution as any other enterprise. Scott noted that in his company, the average worker has between 2.8 and 6 mobile devices already, and that We Energies is a big user of mobile data services via air cards. Unlike the current situation for enterprises in which many workers are mobile within an office or at relatively accessible sites like hotels or coffee shops, Wi-Fi is likely going to be less of an option for We Energies. A worker looking to diagnose a problem from the field may well not have the luxury of being near a Wi-Fi hot spot.

Utility work makes other unique demands on the technology interface. Scott noted that, while he fully expects his field force to use more video as they start getting more suitable devices, manipulating video and other applications is trickier when your users are frequently wearing special gloves that make touch-screen use more cumbersome.

You can find more information on the WTA and its June 1 education session at the WTA website.