Tag: conferences

Business

Utilities developing more of a customer focus

SAP for Utilities

I attended the SAP for Utilities conference earlier this week in Huntington Beach and I have to say I am impressed by the progress American utility companies are making towards being more customer centric!

The event was titled Sustainability for the New Energy Era and there was a full track dedicated to Smart Grids (obviously I attended almost all of the talks in this stream).

Attendance at the event was surprisingly strong with around 800 delegates despite the current economic woes.

This is the third SAP for Utilities event I have attended and I have to say I was very pleasantly surprised at this event by the number of times customer needs were referenced. Almost all of the Smart Grid talks mentioned the need to involve consumers in the process. Obviously, this is a point I have been banging on about for some time, but it is fantastic to see that the utilities are starting to finally get the message.

One of the best presentations of the event came from Paul Lau of the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD). SMUD is very unusual amongst utilities in its fanatical focus on its customers – from its About page:

For each of the last eight years, SMUD has received the highest customer satisfaction ratings of any utility in the state in the J.D. Power and Associates survey. SMUD received the second-highest score in the nation for commercial customer satisfaction in 2010.

One reason for this is that Sacramento Municipal Utility District is a community owned electric utility governed by a seven-member elected Board of Directors. SMUD are far from being unique in this model. During Paul’s talk he highlighted other reasons why SMUD is so popular amongst its customers.

SMUD take customer feedback very seriously – in fact, they solicit it. SMUD holds regular focus groups of their customers to find ways they can improve their offerings.

Also, the Board of directors goes out and holds meetings in the community to educate customers about the need for smart grids and consequently they don’t incur any of the blowback which plagued PG&E’s efforts in this area.

Paul commenced his address by paraphrasing Bill Clinton and saying that utilities need to realise that “it is the customer, stupid!” Now, coming from a utility co., that is refreshing!

Lastly, SMUD uses the term customers, not consumers or worse, ratepayers, as many utilities do. Just that slight shift in the lexicon says a lot about how SMUD prioritises its clientbase.

Utilities could learn a lot from SMUD’s focus on the customer – the good thing is that judging from the conversations I had at the SAP for Utilities event, the tide does appear to be turning in that direction.

by-sa

Trends & Concepts

Never run a conference at a venue that can’t provide water dispensing machines, instead of bottled water

Bottled water is bad

I attend a lot of conferences.

The two most recent ones I was at were both run by SAP. The first was the International SAP for Utilities conference in Munich, the second was the SAP TechEd conference in Vienna. Both events were very interesting for a variety of reasons but both conferences left a nasty (dry) taste in my mouth because the only water available to drink was bottled water!

What is the big deal about using bottled water, you ask?
Well, according to Food and Water Watch:

Bottled water wastes fossil fuels and water in production and transport, and when the water is drunk the bottles become a major source of waste. It takes more than 47 million gallons of oil to produce plastic water bottles for Americans every year. Eliminating those bottles would be like taking 100,000 cars off the road and 1 billion pounds of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Each one of those bottles required nearly five times its volume in water to manufacture the plastic and may have caused the release of nickel, ethylene oxide, and benzene. Then, rather than being recycled, 86 percent of them are thrown away. Breaking down these plastics can take thousands of years, while their components seep into our water supplies.

And don’t just take their word for it, check out the NRDC’s page on bottled water. See also Lighterfootstep.com’s 5 Reasons not to drink Bottled Water and even Wikipedia’s entry on bottled water vs tap water, which tells us amongst other things that:

In the United States, bottled water costs between $0.25 and $2 per bottle while tap water costs less than US$0.01. In 1999, according to a NRDC study, U.S. consumers paid between 240 and 10,000 times more per unit volume for bottled water than for tap water. According to Bottledwaterblues.com, about 90% of manufacturer’s costs is from making the bottle, label, and cap.

What’s worse, a significant proportion of bottled water is simply tap water which has been bottled! No, really. Both Aquafina from PepsiCo and Dasani from The Coca-Cola Company originate from municipal water systems, for example!

Despite all that, an estimated 50 billion bottles of water are consumed per annum in the US and around 200 billion bottles globally.

Come on SAP. You are working hard on improving your sustainability message. And by and large are doing a good job at it but really, bottled water? In 2009?

Here’s my challenge to SAP (and all conference organisers) – make commitment that you will never again run a conference at a venue that can’t provide water dispensing machines, instead of bottled water.

Seriously, if you are negotiating with a venue about holding your event and you mention that that is a dealbreaker, they’ll provide the machines.

by-sa

Conference, Green

Heading to EnergyCamp and Interop

EnergyCamp and Interop and on in Las Vegas at the end of the month.

Via James Governor, David Berlind very generously extended an invitation to me to come along to these conferences.

EnergyCamp should be very interesting as it will be the first unconference around Green IT issues as far as I am aware.

Interop also has a Green IT track which has a session on Green data centres. Given the work we have done on this in CIX, I’m really looking forward to this.

speaking

ISA and IWTC conferences next week

I’m speaking at both the ISA and the IWTC conferences next week!

At the ISA conference, the topic title is “Local companies, Global Successes” and I’m on at 12:40 on the Thursday (Feb 28th).

At the IWTC conference I am speaking on the Friday (Feb 29th) at 11am on the advantages of blogging for businesses.

Then the following week I have the BlogTalk 2008 conference and the it@cork Green IT event!

Busy, busy!