Opened by Steve Bartley, deputy general manager of host Utility CPS Energy, and joined by distinguished Executive Summit speakers Barry Smitherman, Chairman of the Public Utility Commission of Texas and David Goldstein, director of the energy program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, the CS Week Conference focus on metering, meter data management, utility IT, energy efficiency and the best practices of utility management simultaneously educated, informed and entertained. For many, the conference was the first stop on a journey into exploring both new technology and new business opportunity that will shape future fortunes and improve the quality of utility service for millions of customers.

While some industry pundits have underestimated the vitality of the customer information system marketplace and underwritten the importance of CIS in the pantheon of utility IT systems and business processes; UtiliPoint believes that the next decade in utility technology investment and leverage will be among the strongest ever. Through knowledge and research UtiliPoint is forecasting resurgence in CIS as utilities work to improve operations and invest to meet the energy challenges and opportunities of the maturing century.

Over the past year in the CIS market, UtiliPoint has seen that:

• Many CIS companies are coming under new ownership—UtiliPoint estimates 50 percent have received new funding or are under new ownership.
  
• The customer service workforce at utilities is aging and eligible for retirement soon; leaving both challenge and opportunity.
  
• Advanced metering infrastructures, meter data management, and revenue assurance are becoming high priorities in the utility industry and are enabling.
  
• CIS vendors are made great strides towards flexible service oriented architectures and bringing license costs down.
  
• Outsourcing and hosting models are maturing and evolving providing alternatives to whole back office replacements or upgrades.
  

Since investments in technology like CIS are amongst the most important kind of investments that utilities will make, UtiliPoint has developed its research tools, particularly STAR^SM as the next evolutionary step in utility technology and service analysis. For the past four years UtiliPoint's Technology Vendor Analysis Matrix (TVAM) has been the preeminent tool for the Customer Information System (CIS) and Meter-to-Cash (M-to-C) Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) pre-selection. Now STAR analysis is yielding not only ranking of CIS technology vendors but shows the shape of the CIS market to come.

Among other critical insights UtiliPoint STAR^SM analysis of the market shows that:

• There is a new customer value model for customer credit and payment relationships that is driven not by conventional monthly billing and DSO cycles but by delivering better customer service while improving revenue assurance.
  
• There is a new standard for data modeling and data collection for SmartGrid that enables large-scale, plural utility benefit.
  
• There are new regulatory models for cost recovery and short-term rate decisioning that creates both near term performance improvement and paves the way for infrastructure investment.
  
• There is a new paradigm for Customer Service in the SmartGrid world. This paradigm is based on value created through utility, customer, and market interaction and is driven by information analysis and action. The utility-customer relationship is no-longer merely a transaction but a symbiotic relationship.
  

• Financial Health
  
• Market Share/Momentum
  
• Strategic Plan
  
• Customer Satisfaction
  
• Functionality
  
• Integration
  
• Product Testing Support/Development Process
  
• Platform Surety
  
• Quality of Contract
  
• Insurance and Risk Mitigation
  
• Organizational Strengths
  
• Access to Talent
  
  

Emulating the city's founding, the 32nd Annual CIS Conference this week in San Antonio was witness to one of the most impressive gatherings of utility professionals that the industry has seen in recent years. By UtiliPoint's reckoning, the Conference will be remembered as a harbinger of the future of the utility industry and a backdrop for renewed industry customer service emphasis.