The Power Industry Discovers The Importance Of IT Managers

Image Credit One industry that realizes the importance of an IT Manager is the power industry
One industry that realizes the importance of an IT Manager is the power industry

For far too long the role of IT managers within many companies has been almost an afterthought. Sure they all had IT managers, but unless the company was part of the IT sector then the IT manager was mostly relegated to making sure that the corporate email system was working, he or she was not considered to be an important part of the company. However, there is one industry where this is not the case – IT managers are being viewed as the key to the company’s long-term success. Which industry you say? It’s the power industry. Let me explain…

What’s Going On In The Power Industry?

Just in case you didn’t know it, there is a set of big changes that are sweeping though the power industry. The folks who run the coal, natural gas, nuclear, and solar energy plants and who provide millions of consumers and businesses with electricity have been doing things the same way for what seems like forever. Until today.

What has happened is that the raw sources of energy, oil, natural gas, and nuclear have become very expensive. These industries are heavily regulated and so they can’t just raise prices. Instead, what they’d like to do is to start to charge more for electricity that is used during the work day when everyone wants it and then charge less at night when they have more capacity than is needed.

This is where the IT manager comes in to play. In order to implement this time-sensitive usage billing, the power industry is rolling out something called the “smart grid”. This requires a “smart meter” to be placed on a home or a business and then a communication link between the power company and the smart meter needs to be established. The days of the meter reader wandering through your neighborhood are going away.

Why Is The IT Manager So Important In The Power Industry?

The reason that the IT manager has risen to become so important in the power industry is because they are starting to become overwhelmed with data. Just imagine collecting 365x24x60 minutes worth of data from millions of customers year after year. How would you collect it? Where would you store it? What would you do with it once you had it? These are all questions that power industry IT managers are being called on to answer.

Just to make things even more interesting, the notion of security has become a hot topic in the power industry as of late. After the incident in Iran where some industrial centrifuges were remotely tampered with by a computer virus, the power industry has realized just how vulnerable they have become.

A power industry IT manager has his or her hands full right now. They need to implement IT solutions that are going to help the company roll out its smart grid solution today. However, they also have to create and implement the IT infrastructure that the company is going to need in order to hold on to all of the data that they collect.

The power industry IT managers are standing at the edge of an opportunity to shine. Once the electricity usage data starts to flow in, they will be in charge of the only department in the company that will be able to analyze the data. They’ll need to move quickly in order to implement the systems that will be needed to process the data and provide the rest of the company with the usage dashboard that they’ll need in order to make good decisions.

What All Of This Means For You

Technology is now at the heart of what almost every company does. The one person in a company who controls that technology and who should be setting the company’s course for the future is the IT manager. All too often, the IT manager has not been as a key part how a company makes decisions..

However, this is changing in the power industry. They are starting to understand the importance of information technology. With the arrival of the smart grid and its need for massive amounts of data collection, analysis, and reporting, the job of IT manager has been transformed. Now IT managers are being seen as key enablers of a power company’s future direction.

All IT managers can learn a few things from these power industry IT managers. Having identified a key industry transformation that required the support of the IT team in order to participate in, power industry IT managers have catapulted themselves into a key leadership role. Watch and learn!

– Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills™

Question For You: What do you think that power industry IT managers need to do in order to stay relevant after the smart grid change has been implemented?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Creating an IT budget for your team sure sounds like a daunting task, doesn’t it? It can be; however, we can take some of the challenge out of this task if we start in the right place. The correct first step that you need to take when you are creating an IT budget is to show some leadership by sitting down and writing out some assumptions.