Recent Posts by Kathleen Wolf Davis

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...

We’ve all seen that favorite analytics slide—the one that shows the steps from descriptive to prescriptive (with diagnostic and predictive in between), helping you move from “what the heck happened” to “how can we get in front of what may happen.” And while being able to predict what could happen is a noble analytics goal, it’s a long and hard road to accomplish full of pitfalls and layers of applications and tons of reporting. Today at CS Week 2019 in Phoenix, Jeff Horn, the...

Arizona Public Service (APS) CIO Ted Geisler—a self-proclaimed “utility guy”—loves the difference he makes every day working at a utility, but rather than coloring his vision, that adoration only seems to make his planning for the future more pragmatic. In our short chat with him a few weeks ago, we talked about his devotion to his utility and his chosen industry (read more on that here), as well as how he and APS are tackling the big, big task of future-proofing. While APS...

We seem to be in the mire of a new experiment, one that will bring a new version of the utility business to light. Unfortunately, being in the mire of things means murkiness, muckiness, lack of clean lines and clear approaches, and lots of darkness. Being in the murky means a lack of clarity to see just what’s going to evolve or just how that version will precisely look.   In other words, it’s still a time of uncertainly. Yet, no utility can afford to rest on laurels and wait...

In this world, there are people who do their jobs and there are people who are their jobs. In the vernacular of our business, there are those who work at a utility—people who come in at 8, take a full lunch hour, leave at 5, and leave the work behind—and then there are those few who are the life and breath of that utility—people who are passionate about the ways and means that a utility makes society function, who lovingly serve as the infrastructure of our world’s...

Two utilities and three vendors told us some interesting things about analytics today at Oracle Utilities Customer Edge Conference—interesting things that you need to know if you’re planning a program, expanding a project or implementing a change of data direction. Need to know #1: The biggest trends of all in the utility analytics world today can be summed up in six buzzy phrases and a bit of psychology. The buzz: (1.) AMI, (2.) machine learning, (3.) AI, (4.) silos, (5.)...