Five years after deregulation electricity market IT still lacks
common data standards.
About 50,000 British Gas customers have waited up to a year for
electricity bills because supply companies have not developed
common data standards since the market was deregulated in
1998.
The problem has left British Gas £13m out of pocket and about
10,000 customers have been waiting a year for bills. And the
problem could persist, said IT experts, because it may not be cost
effective for electricity supply companies to roll out the solution
which being proposed by an industry body.
David Bradshaw, principal analyst at Ovum, said, "The technology
does not match the requirements of the market. It is an enormous
and very real problem but may well cost more to reconfigure the
system than is currently being lost.
British Gas is not the only company affected by the data clashes,
but it has been hit the hardest because of the size of its
business.
There are 30 companies supplying electricity to consumers in the
UK. Each of these employs sub-contractors to collect meter
information and aggregate that data.
In all there are dozens of companies involved in the collection and
holding of electricity customer data and there is no commonly
agreed standard for data formats.
According to a spokeswoman for Elexon, the non-profit-making body
which enforces rules for the transfer of metering data between
suppliers, the volume and complexity of data is huge, especially as
much of it is very old and resides in legacy systems dating from
before market deregulation.
The cost and complexity involved in transferring data between these
companies is huge and mismatches are usually resolved
manually.
Types of data which occur include details on customers and tariffs,
information on meters, the readings, meter reading history and
scheduled dates for readings. Each company has different ways of
rendering this information and no industry-wide standard has been
agreed in the five years since deregulation.
In addition, supplier companies hold such details in a variety of
architectures, including mainframes and Unix-based systems. The
electricity supply industry has made no moves to harmonise
conflicting technical standards.
Elexon has drawn up proposals for a "modern, simple, fast, flexible
web-based universal records system to provide a transparent
repository of customer information".
However, its proposal has yet to be ratified internally. It would
then have to go before industry regulator Ofgem and the building of
such a system would be a lengthy process.
Bradshaw said, "It is an indication of what a big problem data
integration is - a far bigger problem than many people recognise.
All parties to such transactions need to understand the data.
"What is needed is either a common set of definitions of services
and customer details or all the parties involved to define a method
of translation between the data formats used."
A British Gas spokesman said, "It is a complex system. Errors cause
whole pieces of information to be stuck in the system. We are
dependent on data held in old systems [at other power suppliers].
Some 50,000 customers remain unbilled, 10,000 of these for a year."