Smart Grid and EA – Making Smart Grid Smarter

Many electric utility companies are in the process of fundamentally changing both their individual operations, as well as the electric industry as a whole.  Many of you have probably heard the term “Smart Grid,” but those in the electric industry are either embracing, waiting on or fearing (or maybe even a little bit of all three) the change that this transformation is bringing.  Essentially, Smart Grid refers to making the utility grid system of electric generation, transmission, distribution and consumption “more intelligent” with digital technology. 

The intelligence is to be supplied by two-way digital communications, digital sensors, and a host of intelligent devices such as smart meters, plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, improved substation machinery, and even consumer appliances.  So at first glance, Smart Grid may appear to be a vast upgrade of the utility grid infrastructure and devices.  While some companies may have viewed it that way to begin with, as they begin to look at the specific changes necessary to their assets, they are finding that there are many more fundamental changes needed in their business processes, organization, human resources, and overall business operations.  And many of them are finding their enterprise architecture program to be extremely useful in this endeavor.

Our advice to EA groups at electric companies has been to actively seek involvement in the Smart Grid initiative as early as possible.  While some have gotten involved early in the process and proven their value in the planning of the overall strategy and implementation trade-offs; others have gotten involved strictly as an IT advisor and planner, still showing the value of EA as they demonstrate the linkage between significant business decisions and IT investment options.  In any case, the participation of the EA group in the Smart Grid initiative seems to be increasing, and a variety of outcomes are being achieved.

EA groups are leveraging Smart Grid as the business justification for long-overdue communications network upgrades, common integration approaches and data standardization.  EA groups are pointing to business architecture methods and artifacts to help executives consider the impact of Smart Grid on their internal business processes, information flows, application portfolio and decision trade-offs.  In general, EA Groups are leveraging Smart Grid as an opportunity to do something they have always strived for — engage with business leaders on a topic in which the business has a strong interest and the EA group has a strong competency.  Many a utility company is finding this to be a win-win.

One last observation to pass along regarding the involvement of EA in such an apparent technology-oriented initiative.  As with many so-called transformations through technology, companies are finding out that much more than both the Operational Technology (OT) and supporting Information Technology (IT) need to change.  And in many cases, it is the involvement of the EA team that has demonstrated the future required changes to business processes, shared information, training, skills and competencies, and even the overall operating model of the company.

Highlights of IASA World Summit 2010 from EAdirections

The IASA World Summit was another interesting event from Paul Preiss and his crew. Seems like the speakers get more interesting and relevant to EA practitioners at each IASA event. The ongoing debate on “Is EA a profession, a role, a specialty or something else entirely?” continued in full force.

Scott Ambler, IBM’s Chief Methodologist for Agile and Lean, spoke of his impressions of the roles and responsibilities of architects in an Agile environment. As always, when listening to Scott, I learned a lot and agreed with most of what he had to say. Since Agile is a development approach, most of what he talked about was pertinent to software architects, solution architects, project architects and application architects, but not enterprise architects. Not to speak for Scott, but I believe that is a distinction that he did not make, but would agree with. Scott?

George and I participated in a lively panel discussion with Scott Ambler, Paul Preiss, and Alan Hakimi, a senior architect in Microsoft’s Cloud Architecture group. A special thanks to Andy Ruth, who quite ably moderated our panel with a great set of questions and a little bit of an edge. We had a great discussion on topics like CEO elevator speech, best traits of an architect, the value of an architect spending time in the trenches, metrics for architecture, and a variety of other topics that the audience seemed very interested in hearing about.

We concluded our participation with a presentation on the roles and responsibilities of various architects across the different levels of enterprise architecture, including a discussion on our position on the separation of business architecture from IT architecture. The presentation was received very well. For a link to the whole presentation, see my post entitled “Architect Roles and Relationship with EA.”

An interesting, although not unexpected, bunch of side comments and discussions throughout the event held a common theme – the impact of cloud computing on EA, IT and business models.  George and I will be sharing more of our thoughts on this over-hyped, but definitely relevant theme over the next few months.

Architect Roles and Relationship with EA

During the IASA World Summit in New York City last week, George and I were asked to speak about the different levels of architecture and the roles of the architects that work in those levels. The presentation is below. Slide 18 seemed to generate the most discussion with the participants. Remember that we are not talking about individuals or titles, we are talking about roles. Many individuals may fill more than one role, and one role may be filled by many individuals, regardless of title. All of the roles need to be filled, and in more mature organizations, the Architecture community grows and there may be multiple people in each individual role, with the coordination and collaboration across all levels.

Are all of these roles filled in your organization?