Reference no: EM133532609

Case Study: Cornell University's utilities department serves over 30,000 people in the campus community in Ithaca, New York. In the past, when there was an outage related to power, water, or steam ( used for heating), the utility manager was contacted by phone to look into the problem and come up with a course of action to fix it. This usually caused some delays, as a manager might be off campus or busy with other things .

Those phone calls are still being made in some cases, but most utility personnel are now able to use their iPads to log on to the system and diagnose the problemand even fix it remotely. They can also use their iPhones to log on to the system . The university issues iPads to all mechanics and technicians for the same reason.

The equipment used by Cornell University's utilities department comes from GE and has an iOS a S app for drilling down into the utility management system and analyzing the available data. The utility personnel have access to a Web app for analyses that are not suitable for the iOS app. The Web app allows personnel to control the equipment and see more detailed information , such as the percentage of valves that are open.

The utility personnel can use the Web app to remotely control the utility management system from their browsers. Access is given through a virtual private network ( discussed in Module 5) to increase the security of the system and to provide additional authentication. According to the university , the iPad provides easy access to key information anywhere and at any time.

Questions: Answer the Following Questions

1. What impact does this new technology have on outage reporting and response time?
2. What are the two apps that are being used by the utilities department?
3. How could this technology approach be used in other settings?