Recent Posts by Kathleen Wolf Davis

If the producers of “Who Killed the Electric Car?” and its sequel “Revenge of the Electric Car” completed the trilogy—as all good films come in at least a three-movie box set these days—they should title it “The Rise of the Electric Car.” (And they should call Arnold fresh off his turn as fake car salesman Howard Kleiner.) In a bit over a decade since that first documentary, my how things have changed. Today, the numbers predict massive—you could even say explosive—growth in...

Fandom is a bit new to me. While I admit to a small soft spot for those crazy John Wick movies and an unnerving affinity for Law & Order reruns, I’ve never been a very good fanatic. The Marvel Universe came and went without much fuss from me. I never got into Game of Thrones, either. (At the one GoT party I attended, I commented that this culture had an odd love of grandma-defying brooches—and I was never invited back again.) I used to think this inability to fan was a...

If you Google “Vince Lombardi quotes” the first one that pops is, “Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence.” While the exact history of that quote is rather lost in web-overload, there’s no denying its popularity. It’s available on everything from posters to t-shirts to the football-themed slides inside “The Gamification of Asset Management” session at American Water Works Association’s annual show (ACE) in Denver this week. The team...

Innovation and sustainability have evolved from pure concepts to marketing buzzwords these days. I would imagine you see both of those words multiple times every single day, in fact: in commercial messaging, on signs as you drive down the highway, even written in bold print on your package of lunch meat as you make a sandwich. We’ve reached a tipping point where the words “innovation” and “sustainability” are so saturating our world that they’re losing meaning as real cultural...

Our thoughts about the average utility customer—along with our tech to make that average utility customer happy—continue to evolve. Each and every year, CS Week, one of the top utility customer-focused conferences globally, offers up the details on that ever-changing evolution up close and personal to those utility folks dedicated to continued customer happiness. We sat down with five CS Week insiders to get their views on which branches of that evolutionary track utilities...

Wonder Woman saved Steve Trevor (and at least one war). The Avengers saved New York—at least the parts they didn’t flatten. (Last year, they tried to save the world, but we won’t talk about that sad story today; we'll let you catch Endgame for that tale.) Green Lantern saved the universe once before he became Deadpool, and Dr. Strange tried to save multiple timeline versions of the universe to the point of exhaustion both during and after his stint as Sherlock. Being a...

We’ve worked with Rob Metcalfe a long time now. We’ve got history—and it’s good history. Metcalfe, a researcher in the world of human behavior (especially as it applies to the crazy, mixed-up concepts of economics) and a professor at Boston University, has been in constant contact with Oracle Utilities Opower folks since the beginning of the company. And, since that time, he’s used Opower data to learn massive amounts of insights into what makes a utility customer,...

“Everybody’s talking about digital. You name it; it is digital. It’s a magic word,” said Zarko Sumic, VP, Distinguished Analyst, Gartner in the “Building a Customer Experience Digital Technology Platform for Utilities” session during CS Week 2019. Sumic noted, additionally, that “digital” means different things to different people, different groups, different utilities and different vendors. “Whatever your digital ambition is, you don’t have what it takes to make it happen by...