Deregulation is the stimulus for a larger CIS footprint.
Zarko Sumic is vice president of information strategies at META Group.
The traditional integrated energy utility CIS functional footprint (see Figure 1) centered on revenue management, extending into customer relationship management, commodity management, and asset management areas just enough to support its primary meter-to-cash business process focus. Energy retail deregulation created unbundling and bifurcation of the distribution utility value chain, forcing companies to pursue either energy retail or distribution businesses. Two distinct sets of business drivers forced the CIS footprint to diverge, resulting in products with "CRM full" and "CRM light" functionality that met the needs of retail and network companies, respectively.
Leveraging deregulation as the main catalyst for legacy CIS replacement and addressing immediate market needs, vendors extended the functional footprint into the CRM space and created a new set of customer-centric CIS products. To address commodity risk exposure introduced by vertical unbundling, CIS vendors also extended the product footprint into the commodity management space. Network companies with no requirements to retain existing customers or acquire new customers mostly opted to stay within the perimeter of the traditional premises-centric CIS systems, eventually retrofitting them to support required retail market interfaces.