Mobility Innovations For The Next Generation Utility

Utilities are experiencing rapidly changing field mobility requirements as they race to keep up with constant change in the industry. While the low margins of the retail energy market continue to co-exist with massive procedural and other regulatory reporting, new mobile technology has caused a paradigm shift, enabling utilities to eliminate much of the cost and lag time associated with job paperwork. Aging infrastructure assets, Smart Grid initiatives, new renewable generation assets, budget constraints, increased customer expectations — they are a handful for any utility executive. As a utility undergoes changes in its own technology, it also must function as an enterprise and thus will experience the rapidly changing business and IT requirements typical of other large enterprises.

Electronic mobile dispatch of work is not new to utilities, but the ability to easily create mobile applications that can replace the entire "paper packet" for a job, going into and returning from the field, has only recently become possible — and is emerging in an increasing number of production operations worldwide.

As a further benefit of mobility, many more advantages are available today beyond the reduction of asset paperwork and manual reporting. Crew member reshuffling from the field, executing safety checklists and switching procedures, managing individual and crew timesheets, viewing network maps, and even capturing job expenses like "meal pay" — can be accomplished from laptops, tablets, and even smart phones. The convergence of mobile and wireless technology, with Web Services for integration among systems, and the broad support of HTML5 have created, for any utility employee at any level, the possibility of performing directly in the field virtually any work that previously had to be done in the office.