Electric Energy T&D - Index

Electric Energy T&D - EEMag March / April 2008 - Index

An Integrated Utility Network
By Wang Chiu, IESO, Ontario and Michele Hudnall, Managed Objects
Introduction
The business case for business service
management (BSM) at Ontario’s Independent
Electricity System Operator, commonly
referred to as IESO, started out as a proposal
for solving a traditional IT management
problem. Yet in the process of defining
the problem and evaluating solutions, the
IESO discovered a way to simultaneously
enlist the endorsement of business users by
incorporating the supervision, control and
management of the power grid and its energy
market systems into the IT project.
Efficient control is imperative when it comes to
energy. Businesses and consumers in Ontario
use more than 15 ,000,000 megawatt hours
of electricity per year and the IESO is the notfor-profit
corporate entity providing Reliability
Coordinator and Balancing Authority services
as system and market operator for the Province
of Ontario. IESO dispatches generation in a
competitive electricity market to balance the
demand and generation. IESO deploys power
systems elements to maintain a reliable power
grid. IESO manages a competitive electricity
market through demand forecasting and the
operation of market systems for generators,
courtesy of IESo, ontario
traders, suppliers and consumers to buy and
sell the energy required to meet that demand.
This orchestration of power trading and
maintaining grid reliability is no small
feat. The IESO’s responsibility includes
harmonizing supply and demand across
more than 0 different power generation
companies, five transmission companies and
91 utilities – in all, serving an estimated 13
million people in the Province. Ensuring that
there is enough energy to meet that demand
is an ongoing and highly-complex process,
requiring the close coordination of people,
process and technology.
To this end, the energy industry, including
the IESO, has become increasingly reliant
on technology, which has provided both
benefits and drawbacks. Automation has
delivered new efficiencies, but as energy and
utility industry management platforms have
evolved from proprietary host systems to
complex distributed technologies, managing
technology has also proven a greater
challenge. All of this calls for an integrated
technology network – one with a servicebased
approach.
74 I March-April 2008 Issue
Service-based Management
The specifics of the IESO’s IT environment
aside, considering the case from a purely
IT operations perspective, the IESO’s
technology challenges are not unique to
the energy industry. Across any vertical
market, IT departments tend to struggle with
aligning themselves with their businesses.
Veterans on all sides will often observe that
IT and the business rarely speak the same
language – and more specifically, neither
group truly understands the impact of IT in
the context of business.
The symptom can be traced to the way IT
operations has traditionally managed the IT
infrastructure. For the last twenty years, IT
has managed the infrastructure in the same
manner in which it was originally defined – in
silos. That is to say, IT has been managed as
individual elements, for example, as servers
and network components. In addition, ITcentric
metrics have often been applied
to measure success or failure – a typical
benchmark is availability – whether a server
is “up” or operational 99.999 percent of
the time. Yet such metrics leave a central
question unanswered – what is the business
impact of that server’s availability?