That undertaking ended up being no small feat. Delaware Electric had many
packaged applications that were critical to running the utility. Although each
of these applications performed a valuable function, each was isolated from
the next. Therefore, for example, they had no way to connect information
about a service outage with information about which customers were impacted.
They had an interactive voice response system, but it couldn’t communicate
with the system that tracked outages.
When applications can’t talk to each other, people have to fill the gaps.
Employees created manual processes to move between the various business
functions separated by the individual applications. Faced with the necessity
of cutting cost, these complex processes were a luxury Delaware Electric
could no longer afford. Ironically, even if Delaware Electric had funds to add
people to solve the gaps in business process, manual processes are inefficient
and prone to error and would likely have had a negative impact on customer
service.
Gary’s team realized that they needed infrastructure software focused on
integrating business processes across these isolated applications. Specifically,
they wanted to integrate business processes within that part of the company
responsible for everything that happens “in the field,” that is, on customers’
premises. For example, they wanted to be able to compare their customer
information system — including the ability to load mapping data from a
Geographic Information System (GIS) — with information coming from the
State of Delaware. Delaware Electric needed to be able to compare this information
in real time — especially when there were serious outages that could
impact a huge number of consumers.