Listen to Andres Carvallo in an interview by Enterprise Leadership
http://www.enterpriseleadership.org/listen/podcast-carvallo
Monday, October 30, 2006
Saturday, October 28, 2006
SOA Revolution
http://www.govtech.net/magazine/sup_story.php?id=101700&story_pg=1
Sharp Turnaround
Austin Energy went live last May with an SOA-generated desktop application for call center representatives, integrating the billing system with the outage management system. By allowing a function to appear once but be usable for any application needing it, the SOA eliminated extra steps in call processing, said Andrés Carvallo, CIO of Austin Energy."For example, checking a customer validation gets done within the outage management system. It gets done within the billing system. It gets done within the work management system. It gets done within the financial system," Carvallo said. "In the old days of architectures every application had to have all these services wrapped within the application. In a service-oriented world, you create one customer verification service, and that service is exposed or available to any application that needs the service."Under the outage management system, a customer calls to report a power outage. The application verifies the customer's location, and extracts the customer's status from a database. As soon as the call center agent transfers the information to a work order, the information travels to the outage management system, which dispatches a service truck."All of that used to take about four and a half to five minutes. In the old days all those things were in multiple systems," Carvallo said. "The internal employee needed to look up different things and check here and check there. Then eventually push the button to go to the next step. Now that phone call takes on average one and a half minutes."Before SOA, the application could only handle 4,000 calls per hour before producing a long waiting list. Now it handles as many as 50,000 calls per hour, said Carvallo. Traditional applications required programmers to separately install many of the same functions for each process in an application, but using an SOA shrinks the amount of code used, standardizing functionality and minimizing mistakes because all employees use the same data sets, Carvallo said.
Five major energy divisions make up Austin Energy: energy generation, transmission, distribution, wholesale and retail. The many common needs those divisions share mean technicians can write code once for those functions and make them available to any division. IBM assisted Austin Energy's SOA transition with a combination of hardware, software and services, and according to IBM's Harrison, business processes are going to change drastically at the utility, and SOA will give the agency the flexibility to support changing operational requirements."Now they have the knowledge to change their infrastructure to support the business," he said. "They don't have to go and ask the vendor, 'Can you make this modification to the application?' They can go forward and say, 'I've got these functions. I might need more functions. I might need fewer functions, but I can decide how I want to organize them in order to meet the needs of my customers.' That's very powerful."Austin Energy is developing more accurate meter technology for homes, as well as solutions for more closely monitoring electric grids and pinpointing malfunctions.Carvallo said the SOA transformation and the resulting programming flexibility would better support the changing identity and increasingly diversified nature of public utilities."The electric utility of the future is one that has a lot of interoperation technologies -- an ecosystem," Carvallo said." It has renewable energy, solar wind, bio-mass and cogeneration. "We're not doing this for the sake of building an SOA. All of this IT transformation is driven by the business and helping the business reinvent itself, and we are all after building Austin Energy into a 21st-century electric utility."
Sharp Turnaround
Austin Energy went live last May with an SOA-generated desktop application for call center representatives, integrating the billing system with the outage management system. By allowing a function to appear once but be usable for any application needing it, the SOA eliminated extra steps in call processing, said Andrés Carvallo, CIO of Austin Energy."For example, checking a customer validation gets done within the outage management system. It gets done within the billing system. It gets done within the work management system. It gets done within the financial system," Carvallo said. "In the old days of architectures every application had to have all these services wrapped within the application. In a service-oriented world, you create one customer verification service, and that service is exposed or available to any application that needs the service."Under the outage management system, a customer calls to report a power outage. The application verifies the customer's location, and extracts the customer's status from a database. As soon as the call center agent transfers the information to a work order, the information travels to the outage management system, which dispatches a service truck."All of that used to take about four and a half to five minutes. In the old days all those things were in multiple systems," Carvallo said. "The internal employee needed to look up different things and check here and check there. Then eventually push the button to go to the next step. Now that phone call takes on average one and a half minutes."Before SOA, the application could only handle 4,000 calls per hour before producing a long waiting list. Now it handles as many as 50,000 calls per hour, said Carvallo. Traditional applications required programmers to separately install many of the same functions for each process in an application, but using an SOA shrinks the amount of code used, standardizing functionality and minimizing mistakes because all employees use the same data sets, Carvallo said.
Five major energy divisions make up Austin Energy: energy generation, transmission, distribution, wholesale and retail. The many common needs those divisions share mean technicians can write code once for those functions and make them available to any division. IBM assisted Austin Energy's SOA transition with a combination of hardware, software and services, and according to IBM's Harrison, business processes are going to change drastically at the utility, and SOA will give the agency the flexibility to support changing operational requirements."Now they have the knowledge to change their infrastructure to support the business," he said. "They don't have to go and ask the vendor, 'Can you make this modification to the application?' They can go forward and say, 'I've got these functions. I might need more functions. I might need fewer functions, but I can decide how I want to organize them in order to meet the needs of my customers.' That's very powerful."Austin Energy is developing more accurate meter technology for homes, as well as solutions for more closely monitoring electric grids and pinpointing malfunctions.Carvallo said the SOA transformation and the resulting programming flexibility would better support the changing identity and increasingly diversified nature of public utilities."The electric utility of the future is one that has a lot of interoperation technologies -- an ecosystem," Carvallo said." It has renewable energy, solar wind, bio-mass and cogeneration. "We're not doing this for the sake of building an SOA. All of this IT transformation is driven by the business and helping the business reinvent itself, and we are all after building Austin Energy into a 21st-century electric utility."
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
Interviews
Friday, April 22, 2005
Wireless Applications: Value for an Enterprise
Guest: Andrés CarvalloTitle: Chief Information Officer, Austin Energy
While the advent of wireless applications has brought information at our fingertips, does it really make our business management any efficient or effective?
LISTEN: http://www.ciotalkradio.com/archives.html
Wireless Applications: Value for an Enterprise
Guest: Andrés CarvalloTitle: Chief Information Officer, Austin Energy
While the advent of wireless applications has brought information at our fingertips, does it really make our business management any efficient or effective?
LISTEN: http://www.ciotalkradio.com/archives.html
Monday, October 23, 2006
Innovation at Austin, TX
InnoTech Austin
Thursday, November 2
Austin Convention Center, Ballroom D (new section)
REGISTER NOW
Whether you attend InnoTech for an hour or all day, the InnoTech web site will help you plan your day.
7:30am - Registration & Coffee
8:00am - Keynote - John Soyring, IBM
9:00am - 1:50pm - Conferences & Expo
1:45pm - 2:30pm - 45 Minute Happy Hour (Drinks, Food, Music & Prizes)2:30pm - 4:30pm - More conferences & expo time
4:30pm - 6:00pm - IT Executives of the Year Award Reception
MORE FEATURED HIGHLIGHTS:
InnoTech Keynote Presenter, John Soyring, Vice-President, Solutions and Software, IBM Corp. Mr. Soyring's keynote (at 8am in Room 12AB) will focus on innovation and the role that IBM Austin (leading patent creation site for IBM worldwide) plays within IBM, Austin and the industry.
Security Theater - 6 hours of security related sessions will draw hundreds of business owners, IT and security professionals to InnoTech.Microsoft IT Evangelist, Kevin Remde, to speak at InnoTech.
The Microsoft Theater will host six hours of Microsoft related seminars including Office 2007 and a Vista Technical Session. Microsoft Hands on demonstrations will also be available in Room 18D.
The Texas eMarketing Summit, a special event at InnoTech, includes presentations on Web 2.0, Social Networking, Online Demand Generation and more. See the complete agenda for this jam-packed, one day eMarketing event, only at InnoTech.
Randy Mott, EVP & CIO, HP will open the Austin CIO Summit this year. The CIO Summit is only open to CIO's, VP IS, MIS/IT Directors and other IT Executive titles. Don't miss it.
- A complete list of conference sessions and speakers is on the InnoTech web site, so plan your day now.
Register Today and eliminate one to-do from your list.
Austin CIO Summit & InnoTech
Thursday, November 2
Austin Convention Center, 4th Floor
InnoTech is excited to announce this years Austin CIO Summit featured presenter is Randy Mott, CIO, Hewlett-Packard (former Dell CIO & Walmart executive).
Cost is only $59 per person (includes lunch, general admission to InnoTech and receptions) Register today at www.innotechaustin.com.
2006 CIO Summit Agenda
Welcome Remarks by Andres Carvallo, CIO, Austin Energy
11:00am – 11:05pm
Delivering IT Innovation at HP
11:05am – 12:00pm
Randy Mott, Executive Vice President and CIO, Hewlett-Packard
CIO Luncheon - 12:15pm – 12:45pm
IT Governance - 12:45pm – 1:45pm
Moderator: Steve Guengerich, Director, Information Technology - Bridgepoint Consulting LLC
Russ Finney, VP & CIO, Tokyo Electron
Gary Gumbert, CIO, Texas Health & Human Services Commission
Eric Hungate, CIO, Texas Association of School Boards
InnoTech Happy 45-Minutes - 1:45pm - 2:30pm
Software as a Service - 2:30pm – 3:20pm
Moderator: David Graham, Sr. Director IT Operations , Vignette Corporation
Larry Olson, Chief Technology Officer, State of Texas
Rodney White, Director of IT, Lance Armstrong Foundation
John White, Director IT, Razorfish
Ron Green, CTO, Powered
Looking Glass: IT Priorities for 2007 and Beyond - 3:30pm – 4:30pm
Moderator: Andres Carvallo, CIO, Austin Energy
Dave Benton, VP of IT Austin Ventures
Umesh Manathkar, CIO, Silicon Labs
Kristin Odeh, Vice President, Information Technology, Dell Inc.
Treg Russell, Vice President, Management Information Systems, Texas Medical Liability Trust
9th annual IT Executive of the Year Awards and Reception
4:30pm – 6:00pm, Room 19A, 4th Floor
Thursday, November 2
Austin Convention Center, Ballroom D (new section)
REGISTER NOW
Whether you attend InnoTech for an hour or all day, the InnoTech web site will help you plan your day.
7:30am - Registration & Coffee
8:00am - Keynote - John Soyring, IBM
9:00am - 1:50pm - Conferences & Expo
1:45pm - 2:30pm - 45 Minute Happy Hour (Drinks, Food, Music & Prizes)2:30pm - 4:30pm - More conferences & expo time
4:30pm - 6:00pm - IT Executives of the Year Award Reception
MORE FEATURED HIGHLIGHTS:
InnoTech Keynote Presenter, John Soyring, Vice-President, Solutions and Software, IBM Corp. Mr. Soyring's keynote (at 8am in Room 12AB) will focus on innovation and the role that IBM Austin (leading patent creation site for IBM worldwide) plays within IBM, Austin and the industry.
Security Theater - 6 hours of security related sessions will draw hundreds of business owners, IT and security professionals to InnoTech.Microsoft IT Evangelist, Kevin Remde, to speak at InnoTech.
The Microsoft Theater will host six hours of Microsoft related seminars including Office 2007 and a Vista Technical Session. Microsoft Hands on demonstrations will also be available in Room 18D.
The Texas eMarketing Summit, a special event at InnoTech, includes presentations on Web 2.0, Social Networking, Online Demand Generation and more. See the complete agenda for this jam-packed, one day eMarketing event, only at InnoTech.
Randy Mott, EVP & CIO, HP will open the Austin CIO Summit this year. The CIO Summit is only open to CIO's, VP IS, MIS/IT Directors and other IT Executive titles. Don't miss it.
- A complete list of conference sessions and speakers is on the InnoTech web site, so plan your day now.
Register Today and eliminate one to-do from your list.
Austin CIO Summit & InnoTech
Thursday, November 2
Austin Convention Center, 4th Floor
InnoTech is excited to announce this years Austin CIO Summit featured presenter is Randy Mott, CIO, Hewlett-Packard (former Dell CIO & Walmart executive).
Cost is only $59 per person (includes lunch, general admission to InnoTech and receptions) Register today at www.innotechaustin.com.
2006 CIO Summit Agenda
Welcome Remarks by Andres Carvallo, CIO, Austin Energy
11:00am – 11:05pm
Delivering IT Innovation at HP
11:05am – 12:00pm
Randy Mott, Executive Vice President and CIO, Hewlett-Packard
CIO Luncheon - 12:15pm – 12:45pm
IT Governance - 12:45pm – 1:45pm
Moderator: Steve Guengerich, Director, Information Technology - Bridgepoint Consulting LLC
Russ Finney, VP & CIO, Tokyo Electron
Gary Gumbert, CIO, Texas Health & Human Services Commission
Eric Hungate, CIO, Texas Association of School Boards
InnoTech Happy 45-Minutes - 1:45pm - 2:30pm
Software as a Service - 2:30pm – 3:20pm
Moderator: David Graham, Sr. Director IT Operations , Vignette Corporation
Larry Olson, Chief Technology Officer, State of Texas
Rodney White, Director of IT, Lance Armstrong Foundation
John White, Director IT, Razorfish
Ron Green, CTO, Powered
Looking Glass: IT Priorities for 2007 and Beyond - 3:30pm – 4:30pm
Moderator: Andres Carvallo, CIO, Austin Energy
Dave Benton, VP of IT Austin Ventures
Umesh Manathkar, CIO, Silicon Labs
Kristin Odeh, Vice President, Information Technology, Dell Inc.
Treg Russell, Vice President, Management Information Systems, Texas Medical Liability Trust
9th annual IT Executive of the Year Awards and Reception
4:30pm – 6:00pm, Room 19A, 4th Floor
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