21st Century Economics

If you are a consultant or a programmer, becoming an advocate for improved organizational communications can be a very lucrative career move right now as there is an increasing demand for people that can analyze, redesign and implement improvements in organizational communications. This report will describe some of these methods.

Many industry analysts feel that the entire information revolution and all the buzz-words and technology can be reduced to simply “corporate communications” - the movement of information from one place to another. I have found that there are, in fact, four central elements to corporate communications that are progressively created or developed by the support mechanisms that the IT department in the organization provides. These four elements are:

Data: This is not yet usable information. It is numbers or letters collected and saved in various forms - usually DBMS files. A number like “6″ has no meaning other than quantity relative to another number like “5″.

Information: Data that is given “context” is information. The number “6″ has much more meaning and usefulness if we know it is in the column of numbers labeled “Weight in Pounds”. Now “6″ is information. But 6 Pounds of what? This information may not have meaning until it is applied to some environment or situation.

Knowledge: If we now add that the “6 Pounds” is the shipping weight of a product being ordered, we have knowledge. This is data, in context and applied to some environment or situation.

Wisdom: There is a forth level of intelligence for this number. Wisdom usually comes from exposure to more than one number and over more than one occasion. For instance, if I have ordered this same product many times before, I have a history of experience with its weight. If all other times in the past, the weight was “5 pounds”, then I can speculate that there is an error or a problem with the “6 pound” number for this order. I would then be able to act on that knowledge, therefore applying my wisdom.

Now let’s see how this applies to “corporate communications” and your utility’s Strategic Planning. The IS department is involved in the collection of a lot of “data”. The providers of this data help you create information with these numbers by giving them context. The numbers may represent various power management numbers or financial figures.

The IS Department then turns this information into knowledge about the environment using software like Maximo and Lawson. This gives the numbers application.

Up to this point, the IS Department has moved data and applied it in a defined environment of financial or operational context. What is most often done now is to give the results back to the “customer” - finance, operations, etc.. They then provide the experience to create or apply wisdom to this generated knowledge. The IS Department could assist in this final stage.

By adding various communications enhancements to the movement of this data and information around within your utility, the IS department could significantly enhance the creation of wisdom from this process - in essence to capture a part of the total intelligence of the organization and automate it. How? By Corporate Communications in a variety of forms. Here’s how:

1. If more people can see and participate in the communication process, there are more exposed to the information, more experience to draw from and hence a larger pool of corporate wisdom. This can be achieved through E-mail, Intranets, on-line computer-based training (CBT) and groupware. This supports cross-training, improved understandings of why and how a process work and speeds the process along while keeping it accurate.

2. Capturing the processes, to the extent possible, so that some of the wisdom is transferred back into the automated system. For instance, document management systems and groupware software can be programed to automatically route documents to the correct next person in the approval or review chain without manual intervention. This is a captured process that is no based on experience with the current procedures.

When expanded into the realm of expert systems, it is possible to capture complex decisions based on the accumulated experience of many different people over a long period of time. For instance, the power management software might be programmed to automatically adjust distribution switches based on detected loads. This is an automated decision based on experience of operators that has been captured in the power management software. Expert systems can be very powerful in their application to the electric utility environment since decision trees can be fairly well defined.

3. An extension of the expert system concept is to capture the decision rules rather than the decisions themselves. For instance, rather than say that a certain action occurs with particular reading reaches a set threshold, the software might examine the rate of increase and warn the operator that the set threshold could be reached within the next few minutes or hours. This is a form of wisdom that computers are very well suited for - tracking and interpolating numbers to support the prediction of potential future events. Another example might be that at the current spending rate, the department will use up all of its maintenance contract funds three months before the end of the contract - therefore, you might make a decision to reduce the number of calls for support to a minimum and only for very serious problems.

There are some very sophisticated aspects of this kind of automated wisdom. People that are working on the latest state-of-the-art in this area call their software “Database Event Alerters”. These can fall into one of four types of notification: synchronous, asynchronous, interrupt and time-based. There is an equal number of “trigger” and “event registration” types with a variety of application responses. Some of the biggest names in software are now creating database event alerter software add-ons to their DBMS packages, including CA, Borland, IBM, Informix and Microsoft.

4. Finally there is the automated creation of wisdom that may not have previously existed in the corporate experience of the staff. This is done by allowing the software to use special and very sophisticated algorithms to look for “patterns” in the data and information. This most often is done with massive volumes of data contained in “data warehouses”. The process is called “data mining” and it refers to being able to find and identify valuable gems of intelligence among the massive volumes of data that might not be otherwise recognizable to the human operators.

For example, if the software was programmed to look for time-based events, it might find that whenever there is a large decrease in evening load from a rural manufacturing plant there is a large increase in the account of the local county government. IT would further identify that this occurs in the Fall through early Winter. If this were provided to an operator by dates and times, he might find that they correspond to major sporting events and the manufacturing plant lets employees attend the county-sponsored stadium for nighttime football games.