Customer focus means organizational change

Pat Lawicki lights up when discussing her customer-centric IT initiatives. As CIO of Pacific Gas and Electric Company, a $13 billion US-based utility, Lawicki serves 15 million customers scattered across two-thirds of California. Among them are Silicon Valley behemoths such as Hewlett Packard, Sun Microsystems, Oracle and Cisco. So when the California energy crisis, the Enron debacle and an executive staff overhaul in 2005 threatened to permanently tarnish PG&E's reputation with its customers, Lawicki began working on a series of customer-focused projects.

The centerpiece of her efforts was PG&E's SmartMeter program which provides customers with an automated gas and electric metering system allowing PG&E to collect data without setting foot on a customer's property. Electric meter data travels along a system of power lines to a PG&E data center for processing while gas meters rely on radio frequency transmitters to deliver data back to the company via a public wireless network. Once a SmartMeter system is up and running, PG&E can collect energy usage information regularly and pinpoint power outages as they occur.

Future plans include allowing customers to access their usage data online, and the information is broken down so they can better manage their energy consumption and expenses. For example, a homeowner may discover that running the dishwasher every day at 4pm is 20 per cent more expensive than waiting until midnight. "The SmartMeter project is geared toward letting our customers have more control over their energy consumption while helping them save money in the process," says Lawicki.

By end of 2008, it's expected that 1.6 million new meters will be installed across northern and central California, and within the next three years, PG&E wants to have the SmartMeter program up and running in nearly 6 million homes and businesses. But as they provide customers with real-time insight into energy consumption, saving customers cash and the hassle of having to call PG&E to report outages seems like a no-brainer. Lawicki says that launching customer-focused initiatives (including a service that allows building developers to apply for new gas or electric service connections online) wasn't as simple as flicking a switch; it called for a complete overhaul of the company's IT organization in order to enable it to function as a single, centralized entity.

The first step was creating a Solution Delivery Center dedicated to the consistent delivery of IT solutions. This group of employees, including IT staff, the VP of marketing and subject matter experts from other lines of business, focuses on the skills needed to provide services and solutions to PG&E's business partners and customers. Prior to introducing the Solution Delivery Center, Lawicki says IT-related processes, such as providing Web-based customer support, depended on whichever PG&E department a customer was dealing with. By replacing a hodgepodge of departmental styles, approaches and systems with a body that ensures consistent, enterprisewide IT processes, PG&E cleared the way for undertakings such as the SmartMeter project.

The creation -- and re-examination -- of IT roles also readied PG&E for other customer-centric endeavors. A newly fashioned chief customer officer, responsible for all aspects of customer service at PG&E, works with the IT department to design customer-focused strategies and develop products around customers' needs. Even Lawicki had to step back and assess the part she was to play in the company's new approach to customer satisfaction. Upon careful consideration, she began to see her role at PG&E as 'transformational' and, drawing on her years of weathering mergers and acquisitions, started to analyze "the large amount of technology investment that was required" to revamp PG&E's approach -- and her own -- to her customer's satisfaction.