Mobility and SAP for Utilities

As signposted in the first day's keynotes, mobility was a recurring topic during the 2011 SAP for Utilities conference in San Antonio. Deloitte's Lee Ditmar and Mark White presented a well rehearsed message (and super slick Keynote deck) about going beyond the "veneer" of mobility to offer new operating models and services—plus including other information workers in addition to field teams alone. Again, this sounds terrific but highly aspirational; we'll be giving further thought to practical, real world examples that utilities would actually consider implementing. In fact, we'll be doing this next week at Sonoma County Water Agency, as part of our Fleet Management project.

Other notable take-aways: Mark's advocacy of single task-oriented mobile apps that deliver obvious results is another valuable best practice. And we also liked their characterization of descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics—a good framework in which to think about data and actionable behavior in the workplace.

Conveniently enough, Adolf Alesch from IBM closed the loop on some of this theory later on in the conference with his presentation on Mobility Moments℠. He gave a great example of a mobile app that would enable a field team to photograph a transformer, for example, and connect the image and related GIS data to the SAP Asset Master in order to get real-time maintenance records. This "augmented reality" scenario combines a utility's system of record with its system of engagement to generate greater efficiency and better customer service.