Should YOU be in the energy storage business?

By Jesse Berst

 

Quick Take: As I've explained in my articles about the danger of disintermediation, I am concerned that utilities are ceding too much territory to other companies. They are letting other companies install and manage solar PV; other companies install and manage microgrids; other companies manage energy efficiency and demand response programs. That's why I was glad to hear of a co-op that is partnering on energy storage rather than letting somebody else do it.

 

 A Montana electric cooperative is helping a commercial customer test energy storage by installing a large battery at co-op headquarters. According to Electric Co-op Today, Flathead Electric Cooperative sees the tests as an economic development project. And as a way to research battery storage for use at other sites. The co-op will house battery storage that will provide 25 kw of power for use during peak pricing periods.

The customer, Zinc Air Inc., hopes to install banks of these units at commercial wind farms. "This could be particularly important in the Northwest where we have abundant hydroelectric power and a developing wind energy industry," said Ken Sugden, general manager of Kalispell-based Flathead EC. "In the spring, we get an oversupply of hydroelectric power and wind operators have to shut down some turbines because there is not enough demand to handle the load."

 

From our reports store: "Smart Grid Business 2012 to 2017," published by Memoori, analyzes the smart grid market's size, technologies, finance and needed investments, demand forecasts and more.

The battery systems could cut down the need to shut down wind farms when hydro is running at high levels and heavy spillway discharges might threaten endangered fish. The technology could also be installed by industrial customers, allowing them store less expensive energy overnight and use it to during expensive peak periods.

 

Jesse Berst is the founder and chief analyst of Smart Grid News.com, the industry's oldest and largest smart grid site. A frequent keynoter at industry events in the U.S. and abroad, he also serves on advisory committees for Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the Institute for Electric Efficiency. He often provides strategic consulting to large corporations and venture-backed startups. He is a member of the advisory boards of GridGlo and Calico Energy Services.

 

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Why you should be working in health IT

Health care IT is a field in need of upgrades. Where many of America's businesses - from retail stores to banks to telecom companies - depend on interoperable network infrastructure and user-friendly interfaces, many doctors' offices, hospitals, clinics and medical laboratories across the U.S. still rely on legacy software and hardware. Some doctors still store patient files on paper, and write prescriptions by (illegible) hand.

In an industry where lives are at stake every day - and where governmental pressure for providers to adopt electronic record-keeping continues to mount - outdated practices like these point to a serious need for bright minds with fresh perspectives. Here are three reasons health care IT is a field where you can make a tangible impact - and therefore, a field that's worthy of your career consideration.

Doctors need answers

Time plays a crucial part in the need for health care IT improvements. In 2009, the U.S. government passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (also known as the Obama administration's "Stimulus Plan"), part of which was the HITECH Act. This Act earmarked a package of $19 billion as incentive cash for doctors, hospitals, clinics and medical laboratories to adopt technologies like electronic health records.

A year later, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 offered additional incentives for doctors who provide online patient tracking and electronic reimbursement. "There is a huge push to store and secure electronic medical records for everyone who's utilizing the health care system," says Dale Lineberry, sourcing program manager at McKesson Health Care Information Technology. "It's not just about government regulations, though, but also about a recognized need to provide better and more efficient care and adapt to new payment models resulting from health reform."

Pressure from patients, insurers and even the government is pushing more and more of America's hospitals, clinics and medical labs to adopt electronic record-keeping. Doing this, in turn, can open the way for more efficient inter-site communication, as well as better prevention of errors like duplicate tests, mismanaged care regimens and inaccurate distribution of prescriptions.

In short, "Health care IT is revolutionizing the way you get medical advice, prevent illness, and learn to live a longer, happier life," says Lauren Burris, associate director of Human Resources at the health care software company Practice Fusion. But as health care IT experts know, the path to this bright future is far from straightforward.

Systems need upgrades

Hospitals stock their operating rooms and laboratories with the most cutting-edge hardware and software available - but when it comes to clerical functions like patient tracking and billing, many hospitals, clinics and medical labs are years, if not decades, behind the times. "[Software] installed in a lot of doctors' offices is legacy software - some of it 40 years old or more," says John Hallock, vice president of corporate communications for the health care software company CareCloud.

What's worse, since much of this management software dates from the pre-Internet age, it isn't designed to communicate with the wide variety of other proprietary tracking and billing systems at other hospitals, labs, and clinics. When a doctor's office or hospital finds that its files are incompatible with the software at a lab or clinic, treatments and tests may end up being duplicated - and the cost of those extra procedures gets passed on to the patient and his or her insurer.

"That doesn't happen in other industries - or when it does, it's considered a nightmare," Hallock says. "Imagine a stockbroker who couldn't get your money back after a trade - you'd be furious."

Problems also abound at pharmacies, many of which still rely on handwritten scrip to match proper prescriptions with patients. While pharmaceutical bar-code scanning is becoming more widespread, health care IT advocates across the country are still working to combat "things like errors due to poor penmanship, which cause thousands of deaths each year," Burris says.

For reasons like these, the health care industry needs software engineers and database administrators who understand the importance of seamless cloud-based communication across multiple platforms and sites - and can bring their expertise to bear on compatibility problems that may be putting lives at risk.

Interfaces need improvements

Improved connectivity and compatibility are back-end problems, but many of these same pieces of management and tracking software also involve outdated front-end interfaces. In order for doctors, nurses and lab technicians to enjoy the benefits of electronic record-keeping, they'll need user interfaces that are clean, fast and intuitive - as well as teams of knowledgeable support staff to walk their health care experts through the initial stages of adoption.

"Doctors aren't afraid of new technology," Hallock says. "But if you offer a doctor an electronic health record-keeping system that's going to slow his office down by 20 percent while he and his nurses learn to use it, that attacks his revenue stream, then he's going to put up some resistance."

In other words, familiarity with legacy systems acts as a barrier to progress - which means that health care software's user interfaces and design conventionsneed to fast-forward into the user-friendly plug-and-play world of online applications like Gmail and Facebook; a world whose conventions will already be familiar even to non-expert users.

Thus, if you're a front-end designer, a UI coder, or even a technician with a talent for learning interfaces quickly, doctors and patients are likely to benefit from your expertise.

For all these reasons, recruiters at many health care IT companies are actively seeking new talent at the moment. "We're constantly seeing candidates or job searchers wanting to do something meaningful with their lives," Burris says, "and the health care IT field is the place to do it."

If you're one of the brightest minds in your graduating class, you're likely to have your pick of industries, but "if you go to work at, say, Google or Facebook, you'll be just one of hundreds of engineers," Hallock says. "Come work in health care IT, and you can create systems that may help revolutionize an entire industry." Not to mention, he adds, that you just might save some lives along the way.

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10 LinkedIn Tips to Boost Your Networking Success

 

Whether you're looking for new ways expand your network or want to explore some of LinkedIn's newest features, we have you covered. Here's a look at 10 tips to boost your LinkedIn success.

 

1. Save Job Searches That Auto-Populate

You can save each of the job searches you perform on LinkedIn by clicking the green (+) button at the top-right of the search results. When you save a search, LinkedIn asks you to name it and determine whether you'd like to receive emails with new job openings daily, weekly, monthly or never. But there's another way to check in on open positions that fit your criteria.

Navigate to the jobs tab. In the right-hand column is a box for saved jobs and saved searches. Here, you can quickly see how many new jobs have been posted since you last checked, and apply to any that pique your interest.

 

2. Use LinkedIn's Alumni Tool to Network, Job Hunt

LinkedIn's redesigned Alumni tool helps you find contacts from college and gives you insights into the companies they work for, the fields they work in and where they live. Clicking on each graph will display additional information about the people in that network.

At the top of your Alumni page you'll see a handful of subheads, such as "Where they live," "Where they work," and "What they do." Or, if you're job hunting and know you want to work for Google, for example, use the Alumni tool to find graduates of your school and with your major who work there now.

 

3. Hit the Magic Connections Number

When it comes to how many LinkedIn connections you should have, the magic number is 50, says LinkedIn Connection Director Nicole Williams. Reaching 50 helps you take better advantage of extended relationships, which are second- or third-degree connections.

But it's also important not to flood your network with contacts you don't know, she says. While five connections are too few, 500 may be too many.

 

4. Turn Off Activity Broadcasts

If you're beginning a new job search and don't want your current employer to see the changes you're making to your profile, you need to turn off activity broadcasts. This will prevent your connections from knowing when you change your profile, make recommendations or follow companies.

To turn off activity broadcasts, navigate to your Settings page and click the Profile tab. Under Privacy Controls click "Turn on/off your activity broadcasts," uncheck the box and click Save.

 

5. Reciprocate LinkedIn 'Endorsements'

LinkedIn Endorsements let others highlight the skills you're known for. When a connection visits your page, he or she can vote up one of your areas of expertise or recommend a new skill for you to add to your profile.

Revisit the Skills section of your profile to add ones you want included or delete skills that may no longer be relevant. You can also remove unwanted endorsements by clicking the arrow next to the people who have endorsed that skill, then selecting "Hide endorsement."

And return the favor: "If a client does a great job on a proposal, why not take five seconds to endorse their hard work," LinkedIn's Williams says.

 

6. Customize Homepage Updates

If one person is cluttering your activity feed—or if you're not interested in viewing the "Jobs you may be interested in" section—you can adjust your settings so you only see information that's important to you.

Navigate to your Settings page and select the Account tab at the bottom. Then, click "Customize the updates you see on your home page" for the full list of options you can show or hide. You can hide individuals from appearing from your stream as well as remove updates such as when connections change profile information or receive recommendations.

 

7. File Business Cards Digitally

Not sure what to do with your pile of business cards?CardMunch, a company LinkedIn acquired in 2011, may solve that problem.

The Cardmunch app uses your iPhone camera to take a picture of business cards you want to save. It then converts the information on the card into a contact, showing you LinkedIn profile information and connections you have in common, making it easier to connect online with people you meet on the road.

 

8. Browse Securely

If you visit LinkedIn from open Wi-Fi hotspots, your security could be at risk. HTTPS browsing, which provides encrypted communication and secure identification of a network's Web server, is an opt-in feature.

To turn it on, select "Settings" from the drop-down menu that appears when you hover over the link to your name in the top-right corner. In the "Account" tab at the bottom, select "Manage security settings," check the box and click "Save changes."

 

9. Read News Your Connections Read

LinkedIn Today is a social news service that aggregates the top headlines and stories related to your industry and based on what your connections share.

You can personalize the type of content that appears on your homepage based on industry and news sources, and you can save, like, comment on or share articles that you find interesting. To access LinkedIn Today, hover over the News tab at the top and click "LinkedIn Today."

 

10. Play Tetris With Your LinkedIn Connections

If you need an afternoon break from work, head over toLinkedIn Labs for a game of LinkedIn-inspired Tetris.

DropIn, which was developed during a Hackday competition, puts a professional twist on Tetris. Instead of the standard, colored Tetris blocks, DropIn blocks are comprised of your contacts' profile pictures and LinkedIn "in" logos.

 

[For more LinkedIn tips, tricks, analysis and how-tos, check out CIO.com's Ultimate Guide to LinkedIn.]

Indian IT firms rethink campus recruiting

 

Takeaway: Top-tier Indian IT firms' hiring patterns hint at big changes in the way companies look at campus hiring.

Engineering campuses have been the biggest hunting ground for talent, supplying IT companies with cheap engineers and forming the solid backbone for their labor arbitrage strategy. In the past decade-and-a-half, these companies scrambled to arrive early at India's biggest engineering schools and lock in thousands of engineers whose low salaries ensured extremely competitive services offerings.

But the global business environment has changed, and so have industry business models. The campus bulk-hiring frenzy has dampened somewhat.

"Today's business environment is volatile and dynamic; there is no clear growth visibility beyond a couple of quarters. Companies realize that staffing rampantly and keeping large bench sizes is not viable," said Sangeeta Gupta, senior vice president of research at India's IT industry trade body,NASSCOM.

Last year, India's $100-billion IT services industry slowed to its historically lowest growth rate of 11 percent. Headcount grew at an even lower rate — by 8 percent. This year, NASSCOM has forecasted a further slowing in hiring momentum even though industry growth is expected to be slightly stronger at 12 percent, Gupta said.

Additionally, companies are deploying their resources more efficiently. A decade ago, when companies worked on the traditional hire-more-to-grow-more model, top IT firms employed about 40,000 engineers for every $1 billion in revenues earned. Today, data shows that companies need only add about half that number of engineers to tote up each extra $1 billion to their revenues, as revenues get linked to customers' business outcomes.

The campus hiring slowdown is in-your-face visible. Earlier this month, India's fourth largest IT firmHCL Technologies (whose long-standing slogan is "Employees First") faced ignominy as hundreds of campus recruits arrived at its gates, staging a mini Tahrir Square-type demonstration. Some of them had been given offer letters 18 months ago but have no joining dates yet.

Other top companies too have lags, where the typical practice was to on-board fresh recruits within the same fiscal year. For instance, India's second largest IT services firm Infosys made 27,000 offers in end-2011. In a normal business climate, all of these engineers would have joined by mid-2012. Last  week, an Infosys spokesperson said the company expects to complete on-boarding by September 2013. These types of 18-months gaps were unheard of earlier.

Chastened by the HCL drama, top-tier IT companies are adopting a further rethink campus recruiting route even though it provides cheaper, surer access to talent.

All this does not augur well for job seekers. India produced 650,000 engineers three years ago. The number of engineering colleges has grown, and over one million engineers will spill out into the job market this year.

NASSCOM, meanwhile, is gearing up to announce a new strategy to build occupational standards for the industry. It has defined 100-plus job roles such as systems engineer and database engineer detailing every skill required for each. These role definitions will be fed back to colleges and universities to build job-based curriculum.

Companies are drastically cutting down campus offers, as they tune their talent supply to dynamic business demand. Many prefer to do off-campus, just-in-time hiring of freshers (where colleges or universities round up and march all recent graduates to the company's selection process).

Top–tier firm Cognizant Technology Solutions has used a combination of in-campus hiring and off-campus (consolidated) hiring to meet its business demand. "Because of the increased availability of quality talent, we see growing use of the off-campus mode by the entire industry," said Sriram Rajagopal, Vice President and Head of Human Resources, India and APAC, Cognizant.

Zero hour recruitment should certainly help companies avoid the embarrassment of seeingplacard-waving protestors while customers are in the campus.

Starting a consulting business in an unusual market

Takeaway: If there aren't a lot of IT consultants in your region, think about why that is the case before launching a consultancy. Here's advice for a reader living in Malawi about starting such a business.

TechRepublic reader Peter Pejavi sent me the following Ask Chip question:

I am a young man from Africa in a country called Malawi and I am about to start an IT Consultancy business. What are some of the basics you would recommend for me to succeed in this business. After all its a rare business in my country.

Unlike most consulting startups, Peter doesn't have a lot of models in his target market for how to conduct his business successfully. The first question he needs to answer is whether there is sufficient demand for consulting services to support his proposed business. There could be at least two reasons why there aren't a lot of consultants in Malawi: either there is little opportunity for business, or else nobody has seized those opportunities. Most likely, some of both applies. Peter will want to consider what present needs he could meet, as well as how to inspire potential customers to take advantage of services they don't even know they need. That comes down to demonstrating the value of doing things differently, and if possible distilling that down to a clear picture of money made or saved. He wants his customers to say about him, "Peter really gets it. He understands exactly what I need, and he can make it happen."

Once he identifies services that can sell, the next thing to do is to build his business around providing those services. He needs to acquire all skills related to those services, and keep that knowledge current. If he really knows his subject, he'll be able to explain it to potential clients in words that his grandmother would understand. That will make the practical benefits clear to his customers, as well as dispel any suspicion that he's just trying to appear knowledgeable by using big words.

Peter also needs to spend time determining his price. It must be enough so that he can operate profitably, yet not so much that he drives away too much business. Losing a little business over price is a good thing — there will always be cheapskates that he really doesn't want as clients — but the majority of prospects should think his terms are fair. If he can show them that they make or save more than they spend on him, then price shouldn't be an issue.

In covering the costs, Peter needs to remember to account for all of the expenses of running a business, as well as what he intends to draw out for himself. Furthermore, he must remember that a consultant spends a lot of unbillable time managing their business. Not only do you have to do the work for which you're contracted, you have to spend time finding new work, taking care of your books (even if you hire an accountant), and a million other details of running a business.

Finally, Peter needs to develop a marketing strategy. How do you get the word out in Malawi? I don't know much about advertising opportunities over there, but I would bet that one of the best ways would be via the Internet. If Peter can establish a web presence such that googling "IT services Malawi" brings him up on the first page, I'd say he's well on his way to success.

What other advice would you give Peter? Have any of you started a consulting business where no consultant had gone before? What did you learn?

Also read: Devise a business plan before becoming an independent consultant