1 ASSESSING THE QUALITY OF SERVICE OF POWEL’S NETBAS AT A NORDIC UTILITY Per Närman, Ulrik Franke, Lars Nordström Department of Industrial Information and Control Systems Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) {pern, ulrikf, larsn}@ics.kth.se 1. INTRODUCTION With an increasingly competitive business environment, utilities are forced to optimize their business processes in all areas. The asset management process is no exception to this rule, and distribution companies are therefore investigating the potential use of more sophisticated asset management methods. Oftentimes, such methods are adopted from other industries. An example is the aerospace industry, origin of RCM, Reliability Centered Maintenance [1]. Today, any major process improvement is contingent on high-quality Information and Communi- cation Technology (ICT). Previously, few methods have been able to assess ICT quality in an objective and comparable way. This lack of ICT quality assessment methods means that it is dif- ficult to determine whether or not an ICT solution adequately supports the business processes or not. Meanwhile, the ICT industry has evolved its products into the Service Oriented paradigm, where focus has been shifted from technical solutions onto the actual services offered to the business processes. A service is a function with a number of nonfunctional constrains encapsulated in a manner as to hide the underlying technical implementation from the user. Using so called Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), utilities may be able to easily and flexibly compose services from a number of ICT systems and solutions to support their specific business process requirements. This paper proposes a method for assessing ICT solutions within the asset management domain at electrical distribution companies. The output of the method is an assessment of the quality of the services offered by the ICT solution under investigation. Featuring theory-based assessment frameworks the method is able to assess the quality of services in a comparable and quantitative fashion. “Quality of Service” is here defined as the functional suitability, accuracy, usability, per- formance and maintainability offered by ICT solutions. The method has been applied in a case study at a Nordic utility where Powel’s Grid Analyzer Engine was investigated. The case study was performed by a project group of three students from the department of Indus- trial Information and Control Systems at KTH during the spring of 2008. Such case studies are performed annually by students at the department and usually involve seven or eight case studies at various industry companies. The remainder of the paper unfolds as follows. The next section introduces the formalism used for capturing both the theory behind the evaluations as well as the concrete evaluations. Section 3 briefly summarizes the frameworks for evaluating the non-functional properties mentioned