7. KONFERENCA SLOVENSKIH ELEKTROENERGETIKOV – Velenje 2005
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Preparing an ICT Strategy for a TSO Business
Tony Fleming
ESB National Grid / EirGrid
27 Lower Fitzwilliam St.
Dublin 2, Ireland
E-mail: [email protected] Phone: +353 1 702 7971
Abstract – This paper outlines an approach to producing an ICT Strategy for a TSO business. It draws on the experience
gained from developing and reviewing an ICT Strategy for Ireland’s Transmission System Operator: ESB National Grid /
EirGrid[1]
I. INTRODUCTION
“What do we do?” and “Where are we going?”
Answers to these questions constitute the key elements
of a business strategy. For many businesses the answers
to these questions are well understood and well
documented. For some business the answers are well
understood, but unfortunately not well documented.
For others, the answers are neither well understood nor
documented. When developing an ICT Strategy you
must always start with the Business Strategy. If a
documented Business Strategy doesn’t exist you must
develop an understanding of what the business does
now and what direction it is likely to take in the future.
Sounds simple – but be warned, in these days of
liberalisation of the utility sector the nature of our
business is constantly changing. This level of change
makes it difficult for us to understand the business itself
but ironically it also gives us one of the key drivers for
both the Business Strategy and the ICT Strategy – The
ability to react and adapt to our changing environment.
So using ESB National Grid / EirGrid as an example let
us explore the process of developing an ICT Strategy.
In the case of ESB National Grid / EirGrid, all of the
senior managers and a number of the middle
management team were interviewed and were asked
among other things to specify what they viewed as the
main drivers for their element of the business. Having
gathered this information we found it useful to present
it in the style of organisation chart. One of the benefits
of this was to encourage focus on core business drivers
while still acknowledging other drivers:
Fig. 1. Business Drivers
II. UNDERSTANDING THE BUSINESS
A. Organisation and Drivers
B. External factors
A common way to try to understand any business is
to look at its Organisation Chart. The Organisation
Chart describes the management divisions of the
organisation often these map directly to the functions
carried out by the organisation. However, this is not
always the case and thus care is required not to assume
too much from the Organisation Chart. The Organisation Chart however is invaluable in leading you to the
information you will require to understand the business.
This is because it identifies the people best equipped to
describe the business – namely the management team
of the business.
From time to time issues arise that affect the whole
business. These become important drivers across the
complete organisation and in this case your
organisation chart itself gives few clues about their
impact. An example of one such issue for ESB
National Grid / EirGrid is the current growth level of
wind energy contributing to the grid. This is driving
work in many areas across the business from long term
planning through to operation and including the
supporting ICT infrastructure. This is captured in the
New Energy Sources driver referenced in Fig 1.
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Identifying this as a driver helps us to focus our
analysis for the ICT Strategy document.
Analysing the business drivers in this way helps us to
systematically consider how we need to improve our
delivery of ICT supporting those business drivers. In
the case of ESB National Grid / EirGrid we decided to
plan our ICT initiatives for each of those drivers over
three different timescales : Tactical (short term),
Strategic (medium term) and Blue Sky (long term).
Figure 2 illustrates this:
into large scale projects and some which can be
completed quickly. It is necessary to revert back to the
business drivers and indeed the business itself in order
to prioritise these tasks. Failing to do this can result in
putting too much effort into something the business
doesn’t necessarily want and consequently not putting
enough effort into something the business really wants.
This reflects back to the business as a poor service.
This list of tasks can then be mapped to the
organisation chart. In doing so if the priorities are
taken into account together with the timeline a high
level plan can be produced similar to the following
example:
Fig. 2. Timeline
III. ENABLING THE BUSINESS USING ICT
A. ICT Department Structure
It is important to take the knowledge of the business
drivers and couple that with knowledge of ICT
generally to put together an organisation capable of
delivering ICT solutions to the business. In the case of
ESB National Grid / EirGrid the business customers
interests are served by three groups and the common
planning, delivery and operation of ICT solutions for
the entire business by other groups as illustrated in
figure 3.
Fig. 4. Programme Plan
C. Developing an Application Architecture
Fig. 3. Organisation Chart
A. Solving Business Problems
The identification of business drivers and subsequent
development of a high level plan facilitates the further
detailed analysis of what is not being done that should
be done – a “gap analysis”. Often there are many things
identified in this phase, some of which will develop
ICT Projects by their very nature result in
applications that process information. The information
can be fed from many sources and is often delivered to
many destinations. These interfaces are always well
defined for each application, because if they are not it
simply doesn’t work. However, it is not always
common to develop a representation of all of an
organisation’s applications and their interfaces. This is
known as an Application Architecture. The concept
sounds straightforward enough, but the development of
such an architecture can be difficult and time
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consuming. There are many rewards, however in having
an application architecture, such as the identification of
common functionality and indeed also of applications
dependencies. The following diagram shows the ESB
National Grid / EirGrid core business systems as an
application architecture. From it we have developed a
strategic direction on application interfacing as depicted by the use of the Operational Data Store (ODS) in
the subsequent diagram.
Grid / EirGrid it was decided to divide our systems into
logical security zones based on the criticality of those
systems. The following diagrams show a representation of the Security Model:
Fig. 7. IS Security Model Diagram
Fig. 5. Application Architecture (current)
Fig. 6. Application Architecture (future)
Fig. 7. IS Security Model Table
These Application Architecture Diagrams are valuable
reference documents for everyone working in the
Information Services department.
D. Developing an ICT Security Model
ICT Security is increasingly more and more
important for all businesses and a TSO business in no
different. An ICT Strategy needs to include ICT Security considerations that apply to the business. One way
to achieve this is to develop an ICT Security Model. A
model is used to define the ICT security requirements
for the business and maps that to the systems and
applications used by the organisation. In ESB National
D. ICT Governance
Delivering ICT solutions that meet business and
technical needs is no easy task. There are always conflicting requirements and competing drivers. So, how
can this be managed effectively? Every organisation
should consider how it governs its ICT investment and
delivery. This is required to ensure that any ICT
investment returns the following:
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•
Value for money
•
Business benefit
•
Technical compatibility with current
standards
7. KONFERENCA SLOVENSKIH ELEKTROENERGETIKOV – Velenje 2005
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Add to this the ongoing tasks of managing the
operation of an ICT site (or sites) and the management
of a programme of projects and it becomes clear that a
robust ICT Governance Policy is required. In ESB
National Grid / EirGrid such a governance policy has
been put in place. The main tenets of this policy are to
maintain business ownership of business problems and
ICT ownership of technical ICT problems. A committee
known as ITAC (Information Technology Advisory
Committee) reviews proposals for ICT investment and
advises the CIO (Chief Information Officer). The
ITAC is made up of representatives from the main
business areas and from the ICT organisation. The
CIO, however has ultimate decision making authority
and exercises this having taken on board the advice
from the ITAC. This Governance Policy can be
represented in the following diagram:
investment decisions are made on the basis of delivering business benefit and business value. Our Application Architecture helps us to ensure our ICT investment
is designed and implemented effectively and our
Security Model ensures we always design systems and
applications with security in mind.
Our ICT Governance Policy delivers the tremendous
benefit of helping us to manage the delivery of ICT for
our organisation – taking into account the above and
more:
•
•
•
•
•
Business benefit
ICT Security
ICT Effectiveness
Business effectiveness
Business productivity
Is it finished? In short – no! This business keeps
changing and as a result the ICT Strategy needs to be
reviewed regularly. In our experience, a review approximately every two years is adequate.
REFERENCE
[1] T.Fleming, C.Quirke, M.Carrington, J.Devereux
“ESB National Grid / EirGrid IS Strategy 2005”
Fig. 8. ICT Governance
IV. CONCLUSIONS
A. The Value of an ICT Strategy
This paper has given a brief overview of the
components of an ICT Strategy. The intention in
writing this paper was to provide some insight into
what is involved in preparing an ICT Strategy and also
to outline some of the benefits from doing so. In ESB
National Grid / EirGrid we have reaped many benefits
from the process of producing our ICT Strategy and
also from the Strategy itself. One of the primary benefits has been to positions us well when it comes to
regulation. As a TSO that does not own the transmission assets our biggest investment category is by far
ICT. Our regulator quite correctly asks us to justify our
investments. Our ICT Strategy demonstrates that our
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