Power to the people

SCANA CIO Randy Senn talks exclusively to Power & Energy about the changing IT landscape for utilities and the unintended consequences of successful customer expansion.

It’s been 31 years since Randy Senn joined SCANA’s Information Technology group fresh out of college. In the decades that have followed, he has moved through a wide range of roles, from managing company stockholder records to Y2K planning, before settling into his existing position of CIO. This diversity of experience is something that Senn sees as a major advantage in his current role. “ I’ve had the opportunity to work in a lot of different areas and it’s helped me build relationships and given me a good background for this position.”

After such a long time in the business, Senn has witnessed some fairly ground shaking developments in the technology landscape. So have these changes made his life as CIO more or less complicated? “I would say a little bit of both,” he replies. “First of all, the technology has been absolutely required to support the growth we’ve experienced. Technology has supported a lot of our growing compliance requirements. It has also created a lot of cost efficiencies, especially in our operating areas by giving us new tools such as computer-aided dispatch and outage management systems.”

Dealing with compliance and security is clearly a major focus for Senn. “One of the biggest challenges we’ve had over the years is dealing with the regulatory compliance requirements targeted at technology,” he explains. In an increasingly complicated regulatory environment, the price of mistakes can be considerable, ranging from large fines to serious reputational damage. The task of preventing such slip ups is one that very often falls to the CIO and his team “ We have to use much more structured compliance programs and project management procedures than we had in the past,” Senn continues. “We have to be a lot more diligent in documenting; making sure test requirements are documented and structured.” Though these areas are sometimes not seen as the most glamorous by IT professionals, they nevertheless remain absolutely key to the company’s ongoing health.

On the subject of security, Senn describes a major shift in priorities in recent times. “ Five to six years ago, the key focus of a security area was to make sure employees had all the security accesses they needed to do their job,” he says. “That’s changed today into making sure employees only have the accesses they need and those accesses are very tightly scrutinized.” He goes on to tell us about the quarterly reviews of all the company’s key applications which guarantee that only employees who genuinely require access are granted it. It all amounts to an extremely well policed environment.

While Senn’s responsibilities have not traditionally been focused on plant operating systems and some of the other operational technology areas, things have recently started to change. “Today, our CEO has put a priority on the security concerns with these systems,” says Senn. “He’s asked us to get involved and we currently manage the firewalls that protect the operating systems. We’re evaluating creating what is called an e-zone or DMZ zone, where you actually pull information from these control systems into a separate database. You establish a firewall between the database and the control system. Information is only passed from the control system to the database. Ultimately, employee or vendor access is to the database, and not to the control system which creates a perimeter around the core systems.”

Asked what is driving this increased interest in security, Senn points to a few key factors. Sarbanes-Oxley and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission have both been major drivers, forcing the company to tighten its accesses and controls. Also a general heightening of awareness of the dangers posed by malicious activity from outside of the company has been a significant issue. “We’ve had a lot of focus in preparing for that,” explains Senn. “We run annual tests with external agencies to test the security of our network, simulating penetration opportunities to make sure that we can guard against those. While there hasn’t been a specific verified access penetration threat, we’ve been very aware of the possibility. I would say we probably have four times as many employees in our security area than we had five years ago.”

When it comes to growth, Senn knows what he’s talking about. SCANA entered Georgia’s deregulated gas market in 1998 expecting to pick up a modest 20,000 to 30,000 customers. In less than a year, the company had in excess of 400,000 customers and was the second largest gas marketer in the state. This is a pretty impressive development and all the more surprising considering that as a company, SCANA was virtually unknown in their new territory. Senn explains: “We had done some initial marketing work and surveys in Georgia,” he says. “We tried to find out what percentage of customers in the state knew our brand name. To test that, we put a fictitious company on the survey and more people actually picked the fictitious company as the one they recognized than picked SCANA.” Given this unfamiliarity, it’s a testament to SCANA’s marketing that it was able to assume a position of market prominence with such speed.

But such an astonishing growth in customer base brings certain hurdles along with it. The differences between SCANA’s native, regulated South Carolina market and the deregulated Georgia market required some creative thinking from Senn and his team. “For one thing, in Georgia, we don’t own the meter infrastructure,” he says. “Atlanta Gas Light owns the meter infrastructure, so they are the ones who are responsible for setting up customers and turning service on and off. We had to put a system in place that would handle the billing, while getting all the information from Atlanta Gas Light.” There were also issues relating to major rate differences, credit policies and the sheer number of new rates that had to be dealt with.

It might be expected that such a large scale incorporation of new customers in such a different business environment would have required a complete rebuild of SCANA’s customer systems. In actual fact, all of these new responsibilities were handled by the technology the company was already running. “We used our existing, in-house developed customer information system and basically just created a separate instance for it,” Senn explains. “It started out the same as our regulated system but over the years it has evolved and it’s now a very customized system specifically for that deregulated market.” Over the years this system has continued to develop in response to new challenges and requirements. “It’s a constant effort,” Senn continues. “Every year we have a number of projects that are associated with the market in Georgia. We are currently implementing a customer management system that allows us to track different marketing campaigns and determine their effectiveness.”

Like many utilities, SCANA is currently exploring the possibilities held by the smart grid. It has been engaged in pilot tests of Automated Meter Reading (AMR) systems for around a decade (see boxout) and is now close to rolling them out across its entire network. Though the cost efficiencies of the new systems won’t be entirely apparent until the implementation is 100 percent complete, Senn is already looking to the future. “ We’re in what I would call a transition period right now in determining what is going be our next step with our meter infrastructure, how much of that we may want to move to an Automated Meter Information, AMI, type solution.”

But as the concept of the smart grid is still developing and maturing, Senn and SCANA won’t be jumping in with both feet just yet. “We’ll be working closely with the Public Service Commission to make sure we’re moving at the appropriate pace for our customers,” he says. “We have to provide for time of use reading opportunities for our customers and so we really need to determine what percentage of our customer population is going to need that.” SCANA’s current AMR solution contains an application that can put in fixed-point reading locations. This is currently being piloted and allows the company to get multiple readings giving it time of use information. While this falls short of a true AMI solution, Senn states that SCANA is continuing to study its customer needs before committing to a full scale AMI rollout.

Though the company is keeping its options open on the smart grid question, there is no doubt of the benefits it has the power to provide. “I think the biggest opportunity there is in demand side management,” says Senn. “We have recently put in place a director of demand side management here at SCANA and AMI and the smart grid are definitely going to play a key role in that.” He goes on to give the example of an application that monitors line temperatures on transmission infrastructure. Based on those line temperatures, the company can determine exactly how much can be pushed on the lines before it becomes necessary to reroute power. In effect, this information gives SCANA a far better understanding of their total transmission capacity allowing much more effective decision-making.

Asked about what lies in store for SCANA’s technology team, Senn outlines a few major focus areas. Along with a continuing exploration of the smart grid’s potential, customer facing technology will loom large. “Our customer information system is a mission critical application for us,” he says. “That will continue to be a major area for us as we try to move more functionality to the web, allowing our customers to do more things online.”

Outside of the customer space there are other big developments playing out. “ We’re starting a new nuclear construction program to build two new nuclear plants,” explains Senn. “That will be a big priority not only for the company but for our IT department over the coming years. There will be applications we need to put in place to support that construction as well as changes to our work management systems to accommodate that. Security will continue to be a focus for us over the next few years, probably forever, for that matter.”

SCANA by numbers

• A $10 billion, Fortune 500 company
• Formed in 1984 its history stretches back to the birth of the Charleston Gas Light Company in 1846
• Supplies electricity to 640,000 customers across a 16,000 square mile territory
• Provides natural gas services to more than one million customers in South Carolina, North Carolina and Georgia.

Automatic for the people

Senn on AMR and existing employees
I don’t know that I would necessarily consider SCANA an early adopter of AMR solutions but I would tell you we’ve probably been running pilot projects and testing different AMR solutions for over ten years. At this point, we’ve committed to the Itron drive-by AMR solution and about 65 percent of our meters today have been converted to the AMR process. We are in the process of converting the remainder of those meters.

Within the next year we should be done with that phase of the project and so during that time, we’ve had to deal with transitioning from an employee-intensive effort involving manual reads to the automated read process.

To help us to transition into that process we actually contracted out the manual meter-reading part and tried to retrain and redeploy the majority of our meter readers to the new technology so they could be retooled for a new job.

It has worked very well. And I think by taking that approach, our employees have been very supportive and really helped facilitate the transition.

On the move

Senn on the impact of the mobile workforce
Computer-aided dispatch is probably one of the biggest impact areas for us. All of our trucks have mounted PCs and so all of our work orders now go directly to the PC as employees are in the field.

With our Geographical Information System and ability to track where the trucks are with Global Positioning Systems, we’re dispatching a lot more efficiently. We can send orders to workers who are already at the appropriate location in the field. A good example is an employee who is out in the field and is about to disconnect a customer’s service for non-payment. If we get a payment from the customer, because we have this ability to communicate, we can avoid disconnecting service that would almost immediately have to be switched right back on.

Our storm response is also stronger and we are better able to give our customers an expected restoration time. Outside of actually getting the power back on, the second biggest thing our customers are looking for is information about when their power is going to be reconnected.