CS WEEK continued from 60

Channel Management Lessons from Other Industries

Vicki Flowers, vice president, customer care, Time Warner Cable

Frederick Mendler, VP, fanatical support, Rackspace Managed Hosting

How do non-utility customer experiences shape customer expectation of utility customer service interactions? Presenters from outside the utility industry will discuss their customer service programs, channels, experiences, and the implications to the utility industry.

2008 Expanding Excellence Award Winners: Innovation in Extending a Legacy System Representatives from the winning utilities will discuss their successful projects, offering other utility professionals an excellent opportunity to learn from the successes and innovations of their utility colleagues.

Business Process Redesign for CIS: The Gift that Keeps Giving

Maryann Walsh Wolff, CIS project manager, Las Vegas Valley Water District

When Las Vegas Valley Water District decided to migrate to Oracle’s customer care and billing system, the first step was a top-to-bottom CIS business evaluation, reviewing over 800 processes used in billing, customer service, meter services, and field and financial functions. This presentation will discuss the details of the process re-engineering and how the core team’s efforts led to success

Securing Non-Public Personal Information

Tim Lang, manager, application architecture, We Energies

Karen Henderson, IT security & compliance manager, Southern Company

This session explores the implications of securing non-public personal information applying to employees and customers. The session will share observations and valuable experiences relevant to developing internal company policies.

Wondrous Advancements in Technology Can Make Customer Service Magic

Steven E. Collier, VP, business development, Milsoft Utility Solutions

Steve Collier will explain how exploding innovations are creating a magical new world that transcends traditional geographic, time and

market boundaries. Learn how this increases your customer’s expectations about products as well as your capability to meet them.

From $40 Million and Nothing to Show... to CIS Success in Three Easy Steps

Terry Phillis, CIO, Mayors Office of Information Services

The City of Philadelphia had just admitted defeat on its fourth attempt at implementing a new water billing system with an estimated $40 million spent-to-date and questions about why those involved could not deliver. The presenter will tell how the city went about the mission to ensure success at less than the costs of the traditional industry benchmark.

The Lifecycle of a CIS Effort

George Arno, director, CIS consolidation projects, National Grid USA

Richard McLaughlin, associate partner, energy & utilities, IBM Corporation

Following the merger that created National Grid, the decision was made to consolidate the customer systems into one CIS system. A discussion of the key elements of the decision process will be provided.

Exhibitor Showcase

Exhibitor forum for informing utility personnel about products and services.

Creating the Green Utility through Application Integration

Guerry Waters, vice president, industry strategy, Oracle

The media and customers have increasingly focused on the connection between energy consumption, global warming and anticipated associated water shortages and conservation requires more than rate changes. Utilities have been challenged to rethink their business processes.

Building Your Roadmap to AMI Enablement

Maureen Coveney, industry principal, utilities, SAP

The adoption of automated meter infrastructure is sweeping the utility landscape and has the potential to change the way utilities operate. Learn how the AMI@SAP solution is breaking down the integration barriers, paving the way to the intelligent grid and delivering the business processes that assure a return on investment in communications architecture.

CIS: Exploring Different Business Models Employed at Municipal Utilities

Kay Fuhrman, VP, business development, Alliance Data

With increasing demands and a drive to reduce operational costs, municipal utilities have been driven to explore different business models in support of their customer service and billing systems and operations. In this panel discussion, three municipal utilities will discuss the business models they’ve employed and why they were chosen.

Survey of Challenging New Rates and Tariffs with Creative Billing Approaches

Charles R. Porter, VP, strategic product development, ista North America, Inc.

This session provides billing managers and executives with a sampling of exciting new energy products and tariffs, a guide on the required data and logic to invoice them, and creative and practical approaches to use today.

An Overview of the CIS Market

Greg Galluzzi, president, TMG Consulting

This session provides an overview of trends in the CIS market and a review of a number of projects that have occurred in the past year and a discussion of issues facing the market and what can be expected in the coming year.

Escaping the CIS Replacement Treadmill

Fiona Taylor, senior vice president, product strategy, First Data Utilities

First Data Utilities’ model for outsourcing changes the business case for customer systems, enabling utilities to get onto the latest systems and avoid the replacement/upgrade cyclical trap. This presentation will discuss the evolution of the CIS software market and reveal how latest trends in architecture and delivery models are driving next-generation CIS solutions.

Improving Inefficiencies - It’s Time to Revisit Your Business Processes!

Steven Hammond, executive VP, advanced business unit, Harris Computer Systems

This session will explore traditional business process inefficiencies and introduce new, streamlined processes aided through CIS functionality. Mr. Hammond’s presentation is of value to all looking for a refreshing take on improving business practice.