The value of information

We all know that data is valuable; without it it would be somewhat difficult to bill customers and stay in business. Some companies have accumulated masses of data in a data warehouse which they’ve used to drive organizational efficiencies or performance improvements. But do we ever ask ourselves when is the data most valuable?

Billing is important, but if we get the data earlier then we might be able to deal with a problem—a business exception—more efficiently. Resolving a short pick, for example, before the customer notices. Or perhaps even predicting a stock-out. And in the current hyper-competitive business environment where everyone is good, having data and the insight that comes with it just a little bit sooner might be enough to give us an edge.

A good friend of mine often talks about the value of information in a meter. This makes more sense when you know that he’s a utility/energy guru who’s up to his elbows in the U.S. smart metering roll out. Information is a useful thing when you’re putting together systems to manage distributed networks of assets worth billions of dollars. While the data will still be used to drive billing in the end, the sooner we receive the data the more we can do with it.

One of the factors driving the configuration of smart meter networks is the potential uses for the information the meters will generate. A simple approach is to view smart meters as a way to reduce the cost of meter reading; have meters automatically phone readings home rather than drive past each customer’s premisses in a truck and eyeball each meter. We might even used this reduced cost to read the meters more frequently, shrinking our billing cycle, and the revenue outstanding with it. However, the information we’re working from will still be months, or even quarters, old.

If we’re smart (and our meter has the right instrumentation) then we will know exactly which and how many houses have been affected by a fault. Vegetation management (tree trimming) could become proactive by analyzing electrical noise on the power lines that the smart meters can see, and determine where along a power line we need to trim the trees. This lets us go directly to where work needs to be done, rather than driving past every every power line on a schedule—a significant cost and time saving, not to mention an opportunity to engage customers more closely and service them better.

If our information is a bit younger (days or weeks rather than months) then we can use it too schedule just-in-time maintenance. The same meters can watch for power fluctuations coming out of transformers, motors and so on, looking for the tell tail signs of imminent failure. Teams rush out and replace the asset just before it fails, rather than working to a program of scheduled maintenance (maintenance which might be causing some of the failures).

When the information is only minutes old we can consider demand shaping. By turning off hot water heaters and letting them coast we can avoid spinning up more generators.

If we get at or below seconds we can start using the information for load balancing across the network, managing faults and responding to disasters.

I think we, outside the energy industry, are missing a trick. We tend to use a narrow, operational view of the information we can derive from our IT estate. Data is either considered transactional or historical; we’re either using it in an active transaction or we’re using it to generate reports well after the event. We typically don’t consider what other uses we might put the information to if it were available in shorter time frames.

I like to think of information availability in terms of a time continuum, rather than a simple transactional/historical split. The earlier we use the information, the more potential value we can wring from it.

There’s no end of useful purposes we can turn our information too between the billing and transactional timeframes. Operational excellence and business intelligence allow us to tune business processes to follow monthly or seasonal cycles. Sales and logistics are tuned on a weekly basis to adjust for the dynamics of the current holiday. Days old information would allow us to respond in days, calling a client when we haven’t received their regular order (a non-event). Operations can use hours old information for capacity planning, watching for something trending in the wrong direction and responding before everything falls overs.

If we can use trending data—predicting stock-outs and watching trends in real time—then we can identify opportunities or head off business exceptions before they become exceptional. BAM (business activity monitoring) and real-time data warehouses take on new meaning when viewed in this light.

In a world where we are all good, being smart about the information we can harvest from our business environment (both inside and outside our organization) has the potential to make us exceptional.

Update: Andy Mulholland has a nice build on this idea over at Capgemini‘s CTO blog: Have we really understood what Business Intelligence means?