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UtILItY WeeK | 12th - 18th September 2014 | 25 Operations & Assets A business needs meaningful information about its data and operations to flow freely to fuel its critical decisions. But opera- tions people and information people oen struggle with dia- logue, so the flow isn't entirely free. Why? The answer is mostly down to historical legacy. Thank- fully, that is falling away as operational technology and information technology become just "technology". Operations technology (OT) is changing, so its underlying elements – plat- forms, soware, security and communications – are becom- ing more like those of informa- tion technology (IT). For instance, end-to-end smart metering means bills (IT's province) can be based on exact meter readings (OT's) and no longer on estimates from that traditional OT kit, the auto- mated meter reader. This is a trajectory that will continue way into the future. There are more sensors and other connected devices appearing within and beyond power substations – all generat- ing torrents of data. There will soon be no place for siloed systems for SCADA or distribu- tion and energy management – arguably there already isn't, because the data burden is growing. Fuelling that growth is energy market reform, new markets in water, smart meter- ing, and more demands on performance from the regulator and government. So their tools of the trade are making IT and OT stakeholders more connected. But utilities' OT has been, and remains, the realm of field forces while their IT is back office territory. And they still have divergent outlooks. Their goals differ, with the IT group fixed on data security and disaster recovery while the OT teams are focused on incident management and plant availability. So divergent per- formance indicators and targets need to be made convergent. Some utilities are stalled in converging OT and IT by the need to clean up data. It's true that to merge data it all needs to be more accurate. Throw in engineering and geospatial information systems, and the complexity can appear daunt- ing. That doesn't have to be an issue: clean up and integration can be parallel. The means to align IT and OT and to profit from doing so is available with no obstacles and no downsides. Failure to align is not an option; it's an error. Converging data and goals between the top floor and the shop floor will bring real-time information and singularity of purpose that must improve a business's agility in making decisions. That means better risk management, improved safety, reduced loss and waste, and enhanced regulatory com- pliance, which all funnel into greater profits. IT or OT – we're all on same side – it's the one playing to make the business a success. Suman Dasgupta, Utilities Director, Rolta eXpert VIeW Suman DaSgupta, Rolta It's good to talk the convergence of operations technology and information technology offers huge gains for utilities. people on both sides need to come out of their shells. food producers and farmers, partially due to its ability to forecast the risk of exceeding a certain threshold, be it temperature, wind speed or rainfall. Ensemble forecasting allows a user to fully understand the risks they are being exposed to, whether the risk of missing a trading opportunity or the risk of damage. While the "most likely" forecast will always remain fundamental, understanding the range of what is likely will be increas- ingly applied to good planning. Ensemble forecasts have also extended the working range of forecasts, now mak- ing it possible to make decisions based on signals in the data up to ten or even 15 days ahead of a potential event. This horizon is constantly being pushed back, with increasingly accurate results coming from the monthly forecasts sys- tems, allowing us to understand the outline of what the overall weather patterns will look like up to a month or more in advance, something that was previously thought impossible. Byron Drew, Lead Forecaster EMEA, Metra Weather the 'single answer' from ensemble forecasting