Situation

CenterPoint Energy is the third largest publicly traded natural gas delivery company in the U.S., with nearly 3 million natural gas customers in six states. It is also one of the nation's largest combined electricity and natural gas delivery companies, with approximately 5 million metered electric and natural gas customers.

In Minnesota CenterPoint Energy provides natural gas and home products and services to more than 790,000 customers in 259 communities.

CenterPoint Energy had a number of needs in the areas of supplemental staffing, technical project leadership as well as mentoring and development of a new team of programmers.

Strategy

Work with stake holders, management, development, and infrastructure support staff of CenterPoint Energy to provide strategic direction for their overall Internet efforts.

Solution

• Performed overall analysis of corporate web development direction
• Recommended and implemented internet-based application development environment
• Rebuilt account management application which is used by customers to manage account information, pay monthly gas bills, view gas utilization and view billing history over time
• Application exceeded expectations and was rolled out to entire customer base (from the initial Minnesota implementation).
• Established process for managing web content and functionality changes
• Implemented web site measurement tools
• Proposed and helped to establish web development team made up of internal employees
• Trained internal staff on web site development, support and security best practices

Results

• A more robust infrastructure
• A web development team
• Scalable web applications with lower costs of ownership
• Web site traffic measurement enabled CenterPoint Energy to more effectively allocate resources

Through these efforts CenterPoint Energy was able to become more effective with Internet technologies while becoming less dependent on outside resources.