Special ECM Section

Deregulation, competition, and the back-to-basics utility strategy have created tremendous pressures for utilities to cut operating costs while improving customer service. In this environment, companies are being challenged to build the utility of the future-a lean provider of power generation, transmission, and distribution run tightly and efficiently, creating a low-cost, high-performance business.

This industry evolution is prompting leading utilities to look to specialist providers of outsourced services for their non-core functions. Following a strategy already common in other industries, energy providers have begun to outsource specific functions such as information technology (IT), finance and accounting, and human resources-even entire business processes-to outside providers.

Third-party providers, which often have unique expertise in the utilities industry, create economies of scale and help utilities better control their bottom line. For utilities, the bottom-line potential is electrifying.

In this quarterly ECM section, a series of articles reviews the different outsourcing and IT options that are available and what utilities should consider before adopting outsourcing and IT technologies. The articles address utility functional areas such as:

Human Resources: Accenture's Dan Sullivan and Diane Shelgren address the development in business process outsourcing (BPO) in HR (p. 56).

Reliability and IT Security: Wipro's Rajiv Bahl reviews how to make sure outsourcing is compatible with utility reliability and IT initiatives (p. 59).