Scottish Power has achieved 400% return on investment (ROI) on a
£7m enterprise application integration (EAI) project to link its
diverse IT systems.
External auditors have confirmed that the middleware project has
reaped a £30m ROI over five years, as Scottish Power announced a
two-year extension of a contract with its middleware supplier
Tibco.
The middleware system links previously separate IT components, such
as the company's power generation network, customer call centres
and Internet-based weather forecasting.
If foul weather brings down powerlines, the power generation system
can now tell the customer-facing operation to post a recorded
message for customers calling about a power outage.
Scottish Power has been working to integrate its systems since
1995, when deregulation of the electricity industry put pressure on
power providers to be more responsive and competitive. David Jones,
the company's chief information officer, said, "The middleware is
essential to our trading capacity as the need to talk to external
systems is a critical competitive factor.
"The major challenges are getting the right architecture in place,
getting processes and data modelled efficiently and maintaining a
good relationship with the supplier."
Graham Fisher, an analyst at Bloor Research, said, "The obvious
benefits of integration are the improvement of information flow and
quality through the business.
The challenge involved is proportionate to the number of systems
and ensuring data quality - so avoiding a garbage-in/garbage-out
result.
"There is more data about than ever these days and more and more
businesses have carried out, or are looking at, this type of
project."
Benefits for Scottish Power resulting from application integration
across the enterprise included the automation of processes across
the business and not having to re-work orders on different systems.
The particular challenge of EAI lies in getting different data
models in multiple applications to talk to each other. Middleware
does this by using "brokers" and "adapters" which sit between
applications and translate different data types.
Jones said that despite the received wisdom that a single-supplier
approach is appropriate for large applications, the company had
opted for best-of-breed solutions from multiple suppliers.