Determining Utility System Value of Demand Flexibility From Grid-interactive Efficient Buildings

This report focuses on ways current methods and practices that establish the value to electric utility systems of distributed energy resource (DER) investments can be enhanced to determine the value of demand flexibility in grid-interactive efficient buildings that can provide grid services. The report introduces key valuation concepts that are applicable to demand flexibility that these buildings can provide and links to other documents that describe these concepts and their implementation in more detail.The scope of this report is limited to the valuation of economic benefits to the utility system. These are the foundational values on which other benefits (and costs) can be built. Establishing the economic value to the grid of demand flexibility provides the information needed to design programs, market rules, and rates that align the economic interest of utility customers with building owners and occupants. By nature, DERs directly impact customers and provide societal benefits external to the utility system. Jurisdictions can use utility system benefits and costs as the foundation of their economic analysis but align their primary cost-effectiveness metric with all applicable policy objectives, which may include customer and societal (non-utility system) impacts.This report suggests enhancements to current methods and practices that state and local policymakers, public utility commissions, state energy offices, utilities, state utility consumer representatives, and other stakeholders might support. These enhancements can improve the consistency and robustness of economic valuation of demand flexibility for grid services. The report concludes with a discussion of considerations for prioritizing implementation of these improvements

Transaction Streams: Definition and Implications for Trust in Internet-Based Electronic Commerce.

In this paper we analyze how transactions related to the exchange of goods and services are being performed on the Internet. The adoption of electronic markets in an industry has a disintermediation potential because it can create a direct link between the producer and the consumer (without the need for the intermediation role of distributors). Electronic markets lower the search cost, allowing customers to choose among more providers (which ultimately reduces both the costs for the customer and the profits for the producer). In this paper we contend that electronic markets on the Internet have the opposite effect, resulting in our increase in the number of intermediators. We introduce transaction streams, which model how transactions are being conducted and help explain the types of new intermediators that are appearing on the Internet. We also describe mechanisms by which companies are exploring ways of extending transaction streams. To illustrate the model and validate our findings, we analyze transaction streams in the insurance industry and review associated concepts such as trust and brands.transactions; electronic markets;

Extending Social Learning Theories to Collectivist Cultures: The Effect of Behavior Modeling Training, Service Orientation and Language Skills on Service Skills and Behaviors

Although previous research has suggested that training approaches using behavior modeling yield better results than lecture-based approaches, these assumptions have not been tested in collectivist cultures. This study examined the effects of these alternative training methods for service knowledge and service behavior with a field experiment involving 117 Russian hotel employees. Despite no previous exposure to behavior modeling and no cultural context for service, the behavioral modeling training approach relative to the lecture-based approach yielded higher levels of both service knowledge and behavior. Since the setting was an English speaking hotel, difference in language ability were also considered and behavioral modeling was found to be a more effective training approach regardless of English ability. It also appears that service orientation is positively associated with both knowledge and behavior. The results indicate behavior modeling may be most helpful to those employees least predisposed to service or with lower language abilities

Business integration models in the context of web services.

E-commerce development and applications have been bringing the Internet to business and marketing and reforming our current business styles and processes. The rapid development of the Web, in particular, the introduction of the semantic web and web service technologies, enables business processes, modeling and management to enter an entirely new stage. Traditional web based business data and transactions can now be analyzed, extracted and modeled to discover new business rules and to form new business strategies, let alone mining the business data in order to classify customers or products. In this paper, we investigate and analyze the business integration models in the context of web services using a micro-payment system because a micro-payment system is considered to be a service intensive activity, where many payment tasks involve different forms of services, such as payment method selection for buyers, security support software, product price comparison, etc. We will use the micro-payment case to discuss and illustrate how the web services approaches support and transform the business process and integration model.

Prosuming, or when customers turn collaborators: coordination and motivation of customer contribution

This article investigates the phenomenon of increasing integration of customers and users into the organizational creation of value, focusing primarily on the dissolving boundaries between production and consumption. Concepts such as "prosuming", the "working customer", "produsing" and "interactive value creation" have been used to describe this phenomenon. Within the framework of a research project at the Goethe-University Frankfurt/Main, this debate was investigated theoretically as well as empirically in three case studies. The research question is as follows: Why do customers participate in "new types of prosuming" or "interactive value creation" and how are these processes coordinated by the firms? The results show a considerable range of motives and forms of coordination: The customers’ primary motives to voluntarily assume tasks and activities were both intrinsic and extrinsic in nature. The organizational models identified range from strategies of rationalization to prosuming as a basic business model to the collaborative and interactive value creation between the company and the web-community

Process-oriented Enterprise Mashups

Mashups, a new Web 2.0 technology provide the ability for easy creation of Web-Based applications by end-users. The uses of the mashups are often consumer related. In this paper we explore how mashups can be used in the enterprise area and hat the criteria for enterprise mashups are. We provide categories for the classification of enterprise mashups, and based upon a motivating example we go further in depth on business process enterprise mashup

Revisiting the Use of Customer Information for CRM

For the past decade, customer relationship management (CRM) has been one of the priorities in marketing research and practice. However, many of the CRM systems did not perform as the companies expected. As such shortcoming could be due to inappropriate data input, this study provides a comprehensive overview of the empirical CRM literature. Along the phases of the CRM process, the authors show which kind of data has successfully proven to achieve the CRM objectives. The study provides researchers with a review of the empirical research on CRM and allows practitioners insights on the usability of customer data for CRM. --Customer Relationship Management (CRM),Customer Data

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse