'Truth' from single source

Queensland electricity distributor Energex is claiming success in creating a "single source of truth" as a three-year project to upgrade its information management capabilities comes to a conclusion.

Energex's enterprise performance management program was pursued to strengthen leadership capabilities and decision-making in the company with 3800 employees.

Scheduled to finish in August, the program has involved the implementation of a data warehouse, dashboard reporting and analytical tools and automating processes.

"Our greatest benefit in reduction of manual work is to deliver performance results," said program manager Debbie Barker. "So what we have delivered is automated performance reporting linked to the key performance indicators and we have been able to refine those KPIs to link back to strategy. We report what matters now."

The warehouse is fed data by 12 different systems with some additional call centre information supplied by Telstra. The new platform is expected to act as the basis for the company's future business intelligence and analytics capabilities.

"What we have set up is the ability to bring new source systems in for the information that we need to report on," Ms Barker said.

"With the new framework we have introduced we are able to bring new source systems in without creating a monolithic project to do that. As the business grows, different systems come and go, so the way we have created the warehouse is to be able to replace source systems if that needs to be, or if a new system comes in that provides information we can bring it into the warehouse quite easily."

But while business intelligence is a priority, Ms Barker does not expect big data to play a big role this year. "Big data will come into play for us when we start to look at bringing more of the network information into the warehouse and where we are potentially looking to get results from information we can get that intervals, like metering."