Gene Zimon, CIO and a senior vice president at energy company Nstar in Boston, has an atypical perspective on network technology. While he currently oversees a statewide network for the utility, which serves 1.3 million residential and business customers across Massachusetts, he also has spent time on the vendor side, most recently at Oracle. This is an edited transcript of Zimon's talk with Network World News Editor Bob Brown about Nstar's key IT initiatives, including a move into Web services.

What do you see as the pros and cons of being an early technology adopter?

Considering that Nstar is an energy distribution company focusing on improving customer service and operational excellence, I don't feel that being an early adopter of networking technology is appropriate. However, if a new technology will provide us a significant opportunity to achieve improvements in customer service and/or reduce our operational costs at reasonable cost and manageable risk, I would definitely consider piloting and adopting it. I have done this in the past with wireless technologies and am considering several emerging technologies [now].

What are your main challenges?

The key things are driving improvements in data quality and leveraging our systems so we can get information to our internal customers that's needed to manage and measure our business and improve our workforce's productivity. Our focus now is primarily on improving the outage management process from the time a customer calls to the time we actually restore service and issue a follow-up work order to correct the system.

Our role from the network standpoint is to keep the outage management system up 100% of the time. We're decentralizing our dispatch system by setting up new service centers. From a network perspective, we're basically just building redundant links to those centers. But the other thing we're concerned about is how the power restoration process would be affected if the network or a service center went down. We're planning to build redundant data centers. The first step there is building high availability into the servers, and we're looking at building a geographically dispersed storage-area network.

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So your efforts are largely about speeding business processes?

Right. One key project we expect to roll out in the spring will make it easier for customer service reps to answer questions. We'll provide the [representatives] with a portal to all back-end systems they need for that job, from billing to services. That is all done through WebMethods messaging and Oracle CRM on the front end.

Then you're getting into Web services?

I guess you could say we are. We're starting small, not attacking it as a special project but really as part of a project to solve a business problem. We're moving to setting up internal services for validating information and providing reference services. One problem we have is a disparate set of systems that our people use for things such as addresses of customer premises. We're trying to establish a message-based premises reference [system] such that you enter a request about a premises in one system and it goes out across the network to validate a street address, ZIP code, and the X and Y geographical coordinates. We also might do this when looking up equipment we use. The hardest part in all this is getting agreement on what the problem is. Then we need to build a data model from which we can build the reference services that self-populate as much as possible.

Why Web services rather than more traditional application-development methods?

While we're starting internally, the real potential benefits will come when we're able to take advantage of external providers of certain types of databases and/or services. There's no reason we need to create all these types of databases internally. Right now some these limited services are free, too, although we'd need to validate them. To create an extended enterprise that can take advantage of these services we need to componentize our application architecture, so all the parts can just plug and play.

One example of where we might want to take advantage of this is when a utility pole goes down or is damaged and you see double poles go up. That damaged pole can't be removed without the cable, telephone and electric utilities taking action in a prescribed order. Web services could be used to determine the status of these actions, the order of which varies based on who owns the pole. In fact, all the major utilities in Massachusetts got together and selected a vendor to provide what is really an application service provider; however, this functionality could be restructured as a Web service that could work with our back-end systems.