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By Jesse Berst
"As we move towards a self-healing, real-time grid, the operations side becomes much more dependent on IT," explains Wade Malcolm, Accenture's Senior Director of Smart Grid Operational Technology. "Before, IT and OT were self-contained. Now they are forced to break down the silos."
Duke Energy's Mark Wyatt agrees. "This is a cross-organizational change. It requires top-down support plus multiple champions in different departments. And in a highly siloed utility, it requires a culture change." Wyatt, who is Vice President of Grid and Smart Energy Systems at the North Carolina-based utility, has been spearheading Duke's pathfinding IT/OT convergence.
Hurdles along the way
· Grappling with data privacy and security
· Coping with the impacts to legacy systems
· Mapping IT techniques to OT issues
· Teaching new skill sets as OT people spend less time in the field and more time in the control center
Lessons from the Real World Webinar
Best Practices for Blending IT and OT
Tuesday, July 19
10:30 a.m. Pacific / 1:30 p.m. Eastern
Early pioneers often learned their lessons the hard way. Wade Malcolm tells the story of wiring a new AMI system to an existing outage management system. Everyone followed the manufacturers' guidelines, but the meter alarms overwhelmed the OMS, bringing it down. The utility had to implement complex event processing, so the OMS didn't get inundated by the full data stream. Instead it was sent just the exceptions, alarms and trends.
Oh no! People problems too?
And now I have bad news/good news for the engineers in the crowd. The bad news: You can't get there with technology alone. A big piece of the puzzle is the "soft side" – the people and organizational issues. The good news: Pioneers such as Duke and Accenture have developed techniques to help with that aspect as well. (We'll be covering those best practices in the upcoming webinar.)
Gold at the end of the rainbow
Why go to the trouble of blending IT and OT? Because there is a big upside, says Malcolm. For instance:
· Improved security and reliability when OT starts using proven IT techniques for enterprise service bus, security, network operations, etc.
· New value streams by leveraging data for asset management, improved forecasting, and condition-based maintenance
· An excuse to catalog best practices and turn them into repeatable processes and business rules
· Minimization of "big bad outcomes" as you learn to merge data from both sides to spot potential problems before they do any harm
How do you get there from here?
The best starting point, says Accenture's Wade Malcolm, is to build or borrow a reference architecture. He argues that every utility needs a clear set of smart grid objectives with metrics to measure progress. While you're at it, make sure it's a future-friendly architecture with a phased, step-by-step migration strategy. Sadly, he estimates only half of today's utilities have an adequate roadmap.
You can get reference architectures from big vendors (IBM, HP, Microsoft), from agencies and universities (NIST, Carnegie Mellon) and sometimes from large utilities. For its part, Accenture has created the Intelligent Network Data Enterprise (INDE) to guide the data architecture. It also has a High-Performance Utility Model, a library of best practices for virtually all aspects of utility operations.
Good governance is essential too
Mark Wyatt emphasizes the need for "rigorous program governance." He says it is essential to seek out best practices throughout the organization. And then to turn those best practices into repeatable business processes and automated business rules.
If you take that approach, he says, you can often find 80% of the skills you need somewhere within the organization. Then you just have to bring them over into the new IT/OT blended work flow.
For instance, Duke discovered it could leverage what it had learned with its transmission-scale energy management system (EMS) for use in its distribution-scale distribution management system (DMS). "We were often able to use the same platform, concepts, tools, people and processes," Wyatt says.
Duke Energy had the foresight to start down the convergence path in the late 90s, starting with the transmission group and then spreading to other parts of the company. As a result, they are now seeing strong benefits from their robust framework. Wyatt says they are on the path toward a blended operations center someday.
If you want to benefit from the lessons learned by Duke and by Accenture over the past years, register to reserve a spot at the free webinar, where Wade and Mark will provide tips, techniques and real-life examples. Or you can go it alone, of course. Just be sure that you've started down the path to converge IT and OT. Without that convergence, a utility can't reap the full benefits of a modern intelligent grid. 1
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