Today the 28th annual CIS Conference concluded in Miami Beach. The conference had approximately 1,250 attendees and over 100 exhibitors focused on one of the utility and energy industry's most critical areas—customer service. The conference hosted over 50 workshops on the various issues facing utilities today including but not limited to billing, customer information systems (CIS), customer relationship management (CRM), call centers, outsourcing, metering, and automated meter reading (AMR).

Listening to Utilities
Besides the speeches and presentations that the CIS Conference provided, from my perspective another benefit is the opportunity to talk to utilities and vendors regarding trends in the industry.

At the CIS Conference UtiliPoint has had the opportunity to talk to a number of utilities that are confirming research from a recent UtiliPoint International multi-client survey analyzing the North American utility customer care industry. The report marks the third annual survey of North American utilities by UtiliPoint, and is based on survey responses from 305 utilities in the North American market. The survey consisted of interviews with managers or directors of billing and customer care at North American utilities and was completed on April 16, 2004.

Respondents were asked if they could change one feature of their current customer information system, what would it be. Over 33% of the respondents indicated that they would not change a thing. Flexibility was the most common attribute cited among respondents, with user-friendliness and better screens also frequently cited.

Historically, UtiliPoint surveys have always found changing nothing as the top response to this query. This option was up slightly from 32.3% last year, to 33.9% this year. Still, this is considerably less than the 38.2% figure that UtiliPoint observed in 2002.

Another interesting item that can be gleaned from the historical data is that both flexibility and better screens are growing at exponential rates in terms of importance. In UtiliPoint's initial survey flexibility was a distant second. Now it is by far the feature that utilities would like to see improved. The initial survey also saw better screens ranked sixth in terms of the feature that utilities would most like to change. It is now ranked third, and continues to trend upward.

CIS Market Continues to Improve
Since 2002 the number of utilities that are in the market for a new CIS has grown dramatically. This year 15.9% of respondents indicated that they are in the market for a new CIS.

While this growth is coming from all of the regions of the United States, Canadian respondents did report a slight decline from the previous year. Of all the regions, the Northeastern United States has a higher percentage of utilities that are in the market for a new CIS, and the Midwestern United States has the lowest percentage. Even so, all regions reported double-digit growth.

Looking at the information by company type reveals that most of the growth is coming from investor-owned utilities and municipal utilities.

For these forty-eight utility respondents that are in the market for a new CIS, ease of use and functionality were the factors most rated as very important, with the ability to integrate being a close third. Ease of use was cited as very important by 75% of these respondents, and functionality was cited as very important by 77%. The factor that was least cited as being very important was regulatory requirements at 18.8%.

Why Replace a CIS?
On a scale of 1 to 5, where 5 is very important and 1 is not important at all, the determining factors with the highest average scores from the 48 respondents that are in the market for a new CIS were for ease of use (4.73) and functionality (4.77). The lowest average score was for regulatory requirements (2.83).

While at the conference, UtiliPoint spoke with many utilities that confirmed the integration issue. Today, many utilities of all sizes are continuing to have difficulty integrating the CIS to various other applications that exist within the utility enterprise.

Some of these systems include work management, outage management, asset management, and back-end financials. Newer technologies and application frameworks are enabling better integration in the utility enterprise. These include object oriented architectures that employ either a .NET and/or J2EE design. As these emerging technologies enter the tool-box of CIS vendors, integration issues should come down on the list of determining factors.

The survey, along with the many conversations that UtiliPoint has had with both utilities and vendors at the CIS Conference, indicates that the CIS marketplace is improving and that the market continues to change at a very rapid pace. Look for this year to be a deciding one for many CIS vendors in the area of utility and energy customer care.