1. Information Governance and Change Forum
21 September 2011
IMPLEMENTING AN INTEGRATED
INFORMATION MANAGEMENT
STRATEGY
Bob Minchin
Manager Network Data
Ergon Energy

2. Ergon Energy
? Electricity Distributor, Retailer and Generator
? Customers 680,000
? Operating area over one million square kilometres
? Employees 4,600
? Powerlines 150,000 kilometres
? Power poles 1,000,000
? Generation 55MW gas-fired power station on grid
? 33 stand-alone power stations
? Asset base $8.7 billion.
? CAPEX 2009-10 $670M
? OPEX 2009-10 $490M

3. Issues for Ergon Energy - past and present
? Ergon Energy formed from 6 small distributors in 1999
? Huge amount of organisational change
? Silos common – to isolate from the “instability” of change elsewhere in the business
? Data low priority until a report needed or a crisis arose
? Expedient solutions “within the silo”
? Asset Management demands quality asset information for efficiency
? Energy conservation / Smart Grid challenges
? Customer service is more effective when based on
? Knowledge of assets
? Linking of customer information to the physical world
? Thinking is maturing rapidly under pressure from the Australian Electricity Regulator,
Owner

4. Today’s discussion – 4 topics
1. Integrating information held across disparate repositories and
organisational silos into a single system
2. Creating and implementing a organisation wide taxonomy/ unified
metadata
3. Assessing the risks and governance issues of information in the cloud
4. Responding adequately to constant organisational and technological
changes

5. 1. Integrating information held across disparate repositories
and organisational silos into a single system
? Activities are often so diverse and complex that there is no single system that will
host all of the tasks
? Datastores tied to systems
? Managing a collection of datastores in an integrated fashion requires
? care about data mastering
? understanding data flows within individual repositories and across interfaces, timing
? robust business processes that create, modify and use data
? Metadata, Lineage of data
? Integration activities are never conducted in a “greenfield” situation
? Existing problems in data architecture, systems
? Imperfect business processes
? (Legacy) data quality
? How do we create the time and space ?
? get the basic architectures and processes right
? fix the system defects
? conduct the data cleanse

6. 2. Creating and implementing a organisation wide
taxonomy / unified metadata
? There is only one choice here (Do you agree?)
? avoid the huge amount of effort sorting out the conflicts and misinterpretations that will
become a weekly or even daily occurrence.
? Understand what your business does (with data)
? Build and maintain a logical data model
? Multi-user concept
? Business-wide glossary
? Clear, accessible definitions improve efficiency, reduce errors
? Maintain the glossary
? Manage it – connect to all continuous improvement programs, projects, move close to
the leading edge of the business
? Implement the discipline of effective governance for information management
? Collect and maintain metadata
? Reports must be included
? Supported by organisational structure / accountabilities

7. 3. Assessing the risks and governance issues of
information in the cloud
? Outside the “corporate fence” – basic security concerns
? Legal issues related to the physical location of data
? some multinational corporations providing these cloud storage services are at a higher level
than the governments of the world (in terms of their ability to control access by third parties to
your information)
? do the hosting companies have acceptable business and ethical standards ?
? Performance issues related to data transfers may impact the architectures of both
systems and data
? Use of cloud-based application servers and storage provides an opportunity for an
imaginative rethink of requirements
? backups, availability
? version management
? updating philosophies and process
? Effective technical audit may be a challenge

8. 4. Responding adequately to constant organisational and
technological changes
? Changes to KPI’s drive managers’ behaviours
? maintaining effective stewardship of data as individuals cope with structural alterations to the
business, new faces, training
? information is usually well down the list of priorities
? External pressures can change KPI’s
? Fight back - implement measures to scorecards (applies also to points 1 and 2)
? Organisational culture plays a key role
? determines the instinctive responses of individuals (including managers at all levels) to
situations and questions that have not been previously encountered
? Externally driven changes can have deep impacts on our data
? e.g. energy conservation programs, demand management, new sources of generation such
as PV
? we require quality data that can be taken into mainstream business enabling the expected
benefits to be delivered (e.g. planning, operations)
? Governance structures must extend wider in the business and link with external initiatives
from government (who are starting to realise that disjointed data gets in the way of benefit
realisation)

9. Questions …