Technology Innovation and Xcel Energy

I am fascinated by how different companies are using technology to solve their "last mile" issues - laying cables, delivering boxes, scheduling field engineers etc. so I enjoyed this article about how Xcel Energy is using technology for its dispatch function ...but there is more.

What is interesting here is how the company pushed 5 of its vendors - IBM, Indus, SPL, Mercury and Itron - to more than deliver their packaged solutions but instead to work with each other and innovate.

This is encouraging because as I have been writing my innovation series and talking to a number of CIOs,  the feedback has mostly been the innovation teams have been internal and those teams have taken off the shelf (though early) technology like WI-FI or RFID and run with it. When I asked one executive what role a certain systems integrator played on his innovation project, his answer was very direct - "We are the brains, they are the hands".

If vendors expect innovation v/s utility pricing, they will have to step up like these vendors did for Xcel.

I am fascinated by how different companies are using technology to solve their "last mile" issues - laying cables, delivering boxes, scheduling field engineers etc. so I enjoyed this article about how Xcel Energy is using technology for its dispatch function ...but there is more.

What is interesting here is how the company pushed 5 of its vendors - IBM, Indus, SPL, Mercury and Itron - to more than deliver their packaged solutions but instead to work with each other and innovate.

This is encouraging because as I have been writing my innovation series and talking to a number of CIOs,  the feedback has mostly been the innovation teams have been internal and those teams have taken off the shelf (though early) technology like WI-FI or RFID and run with it. When I asked one executive what role a certain systems integrator played on his innovation project, his answer was very direct - "We are the brains, they are the hands".

If vendors expect innovation v/s utility pricing, they will have to step up like these vendors did for Xcel.