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Member Spotlight: Ben Ettlinger
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Member Spotlight: Ben Ettlinger
Ben Ettlinger is an active UAI member and provides outstanding influence and contributions to the UAI community through his high-level of engagement on UAI Connect and his active involvement in the monthly UAI Community Conversations. As thanks, we are featuring Ben in the very first UAI Member Spotlight. The UAI Member Spotlight is a new monthly feature on UAI Connect. Our Member Spotlight will feature a UAI member each month; either an individual member for his/her level of engagement, influence, and contribution to the UAI community or a UAI Utility Member organization for something outstanding they have accomplished.
Ben has been in the utility industry for close to 30 years and mostly in data related capacities.
Kevin: How did you get into the utility analytics industry?
Ben: My tenure at NYPA has been data centric since I joined. I began as a data modeler and designed relational databases for many years, eventually combining that with data administration, and then from there, since my concentration was data, I moved on to manage a major billing conversion data project into SAP BW. This, in turn, lead me to managing the SAP BW environment. From there, I moved on to manage numerous other data related efforts. When the idea of data analytics emerged, I got the nod to begin creating a Digital Analytics Group.Kevin: What project have you enjoyed working on most in your career?
Ben: I found the greatest satisfaction in successfully building and managing the analytics group. At the time it was challenging, new, innovative, scientific, allowed me to leverage the years-long accumulate knowledge of utility industry data and finally an opportunity to appreciate mathematics, which was not my favorite subject in school.Kevin: What has been your biggest professional challenge and how did you work through it?
Ben: In analytics, the biggest challenge was hiring data scientists who would have the background and correct fit to support our analytics needs, and within the financial resources made available to us. We were successful though, with plain old put the rubber to the road, searching through scores and scores of resumes. Even with job service companies who use their own analytics, it was quite a challenge, but thankfully we were successful in finding what we were looking for.Kevin: If you could go back in time and give yourself one piece of advice before entering the utility analytics industry, what would it be?
Ben: Understand the complexity of analytics, the challenges in finding qualified personnel, the challenges to introduce the business to the power of analytics and, getting on your soap box to preach the power of analytics and what it can achieve.Kevin: What would you like to talk to fellow colleagues and members about in UAI Connect? Or, what issues or topics would you like to see more discussions on in UAI Connect?
Ben: Three things; use cases, use cases use cases. Three more things, technology, technology and more technology. I’m not asking to share your secret algorithms, although I will not stop you. We are always looking for innovative analytics and technology ideas that we can apply to our own situation, especially in this Covid-19 environment. Just this morning, I discovered a new air purifying device designed for Covid and a project to determine if Covid spread via sewage waste analysis. We also want to hear about what utilities are doing in terms of predictive and prescriptive analytics or edge devices with regard to river ice prediction, transmission and generation asset health, flood prediction, any other emerging technology both hardware and software that will enhance the utility business.Kevin: Thank you so much for sharing with us and for being a highly engaged member of UAI!
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Kevin Praet
Membership Coordinator
Utility Analytics Institute (UAI)
Boulder CO
315-440-3033
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3 Replies
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Hi All
Just wanted to mention that the Association of Edison Illuminating Companies Load Research and Analytics Committee (AEIC) offers some really good training courses at three levels. (Fundamentals, Statistical Methods, and Advanced). The courses are geared more to the analysis of load profile data and their uses within the utility (Cost of Service, Load forecast, Distribution Planning, Measurement and Verification, DER impact planning, etc…). I believe internal planners of enterprise systems would get a lot of insights on how data is used within utilities from this community as they have been dealing with large data sets of interval data for 30 years. I know it’s one piece of a larger puzzle, but getting a good understanding of how data get used within the enterprise siloes makes it easier to architect an efficient landscape.
Some additional insights…..
https://blogs.dnvgl.com/energy/what-are-the-risks-of-drowning-if-i-build-my-own-data-lake
Sincerely,
Claude GodinSenior Principal Consultant, Policy Advisory and Research, Key Initiatives, PAR
DNV GL Energy Insights USA, Inc.
claude.godin@dnvgl.com
Mobile +1 (919) 539-3231
DNV GL® – a member of Det Norske Veritas® group.
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Cheryl / Mark / Pat:
I had a question for you – what do you mean by Data Literacy? In other words, what are you hoping to accomplish with this curriculum? TVA, my employer, has implemented something similar, although I think it’s just in a pilot and not rolled out to the whole company. But it’s not really clear to me what we expect to accomplish with these courses. We are still in the early stages of curation of our data – meaning that data still “lives” in various different data sources, and some of them talk to each other, but others don’t, and there’s no central catalog of all of the data available, so not everyone knows where to get data, and there are duplicated sources in some instances, and not a “single source of truth.” It seems to me that all of these issues really need to be resolved, so that the Enterprise Data Lake (or warehouse) becomes the single source for information for everyone in the organization; and then we could spend some time educating people about how to work with the data to extract relevant analyses. I just feel like if we conduct these courses now, we spend most of the time in the courses talking about how to connect to various data sources, and not enough time talking about how to extract the relevant data and analyze it correctly.
I also think that once you have a good data lake / warehouse, and make it available to everyone, people will learn the techniques they need on their own, and you won’t need a detailed curriculum.
That’s just my two-cents worth.
Kaz.
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Kaz Shakir
Sr. Program Manager, Power Operations Asset Planning
The Tennessee Valley Authority
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Cheryl – Sarah Green and I presented the Analytics U (university) effort at Consumer Energy, deck is attached. Please see slide 16, talks about specific courses for the 3 levels. We picked courses from Edx, Coursera and Youtube; mostly free courses we curated. If you want the specific courses I can find the links though you may want to check out the latest online offerings and create your own curated list.
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Vijoy Mathew
Executive Director, IT Enterprise Architecture and Application Portfolio Services
Consumers Energy
Jackson MI
5177683125
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Original Message:
Sent: 05-04-2020 12:49
From: Cheryl Pressley
Subject: Data LiteracyHi all,
We’re working on developing a Data Literacy program and I would love to get some feedback from the group on the following questions:
- If you’ve created or are creating a Data Literacy program, what categories of learning are you offering or do you plan to offer?
- Are you identifying or planning to identify relevant training?
- If yes, what training sources are you utilizing?
Thanks so much for your feedback!
Best regards,
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Cheryl Pressley
Data Analytics & Reporting
Southern Company
Office: 404.506.2190 | Email: ccpressl@southernco.com
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Great work Vijoy! Thanks for sharing. This will be very helpful to me as we move our University forward.
PATRICK D. DEVER
Avista Corp. – NYSE: AVA
Chief Data StrategistPhone: 509-495-8524; Fax: 509-777-6062
Email: pat.dever@avistacorp.com
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——Original Message——
Cheryl – Sarah Green and I presented the Analytics U (university) effort at Consumer Energy, deck is attached. Please see slide 16, talks about specific courses for the 3 levels. We picked courses from Edx, Coursera and Youtube; mostly free courses we curated. If you want the specific courses I can find the links though you may want to check out the latest online offerings and create your own curated list.
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Vijoy Mathew
Executive Director, IT Enterprise Architecture and Application Portfolio Services
Consumers Energy
Jackson MI
5177683125
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