United They Stand

Introduction

Southside Electric Cooperative (SEC) is a nonprofit, member-owned electric distribution cooperative that is dedicated to "Helping rural families live better electrically" (Oz, 2009). Their dedication to providing good service is what caused a significant growth in its number of customers. For Southside Electric, this growth also presented IT problems. The cooperative's unconnected systems resulted in service delays which were both labor and time intensive and created reporting errors that affected service to its customers. Lack of integration required data to be manually entered and caused inconsistencies and errors which led to management concerns and customer frustration. SEC decided to build a new system to better serve its customers and chose to go with service oriented architecture (SOA). The priority was for IT staff to integrate and link SEC's existing hardware and software and data sources that track customer records, outages, automated meter management and geographical maps to a new database. They chose to go with IBM's WebSphere software because IBM offered to analyze the system before the purchase. The case is a great example of how using and merging already existing databases into one integrated system can help company to achieve its business goals and increase its productivity and efficiency.

Answers to the Questions:

1. The problem with the old system was with the disconnection between the six disparate databases they were using, which resulted in inefficiencies. All the service steps were written up on pieces of paper and later entered manually into the database by different people that led to inaccuracies.

2. The original databases were not changed. The IT staff with help of an IBM consultant implemented a SOA solution for SEC that seamlessly integrated their original customer information system with geographical information system, automated meter reading, financial and material management and mobile data. This integration allowed the technicians in the field and office personnel to share data in "real time" eliminating the manual data-transfer processes that previously affected the employee's efficiencies and customer service.

3. By having an integrated, centralized view of all