Companies in utility industry (i.e. energy, water, gas and district heating suppliers) are facing a continuously changing business environment due to new regulations and bylaws from regulating authorities and due to competitors implementing innovative technical solutions in grid operations or metering services, like intelligent metering or grid utilization management. In this context, both the business processes in organizations and information systems supporting these processes need to be quickly adaptive to changing organizational needs. Examples for typical business functions are assets accounting, processing and examination of invoices, meter readings, meter data evaluation, automatic billing, customer relationship management, maintenance management, inventory management, order management and project management.

Work of the chair business information systems for utility industries focused so far on two topics: business process improvement and outsourcing and enterprise architecture management. In business process management and business process outsourcing our focus was on market communication processes and on processes with many variants. In the project Capability-as-a-Service (CaaS) we tightly cooperated with SIV.AG for more efficient processes and adaptable designs. Technical concepts used were context-based business services and process patterns. In enterprise architecture management we developed a reference enterprise architecture for medium-sized utility companies as part of the ECLORA project. This reference architecture supports the transition to cloud-based architectures and the business changes caused by the “energy turnaround”, i.e. the radical shift to renewable energies.