6.2. ERMUSR 10-10-2017 - Laserfiche WebLink

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Elk River Municipal Utilities UTILITIES COMMISSION MEETING TO: FROM: ERMU Commission Mike Tietz—Technical Services Superintendent MEETING DATE: AGENDA ITEM NUMBER: October 10, 2017 6.3 SUBJECT: Report on NISC Member Information Conference ACTION REQUESTED: None BACKGROUND/DISCUSSION: The 2017 NISC Member Information Conference (MIC),held at the America's Conference Center in St. Louis,MO, September 25-28, included numerous member led sessions on topics ranging from Mobilizing the Workforce to Outage Management and Work Management. Most of the sessions were practical workshops focused on a specific iVUE module or technology. On Wednesday morning, we listened to guest speaker John Brennan who was the Director of the CIA from 2013 until 2017. He talked about his 36 year career in national security and how utilities will need to prepare for cyber-terrorism that will come indirectly from other countries. In a Q&A session with Vern Dosch, CEO of NISC, Mr. Brennan was asked "What was the biggest disappointment in his career?"to which he responded"September 11th, 2001". The speech was thought provoking and very insightful into the pressures and realities that we all have to face at some time in our careers. Jennie and Jessica focused the majority of their attended sessions on the CIS module.NISC is going to a new platform called iVUE Connect and they focused many of their sessions on that. This will be a cloud based platform and is very different than the current iVUE database. There are three main changes that NISC is rolling out within the next year are:the Delinquent/Collections persona for iVUE Connect, ability to capture electronic signatures within SmartHub, and a new NISC Community. The MIC offers "roadmap" sessions to highlight the changes in upcoming releases,which is very helpful since changes are made so frequently and it is hard to keep up on everything that is coming. Ben focused the majority of his attended sessions on the ABS module. This module has many features that are layered within. It was helpful in understanding what reports to run in order to see activity from charge outs to vendor P.O.'s. In addition creating material estimates for customers in a more timely and accurate manner. Melissa and Kathy focused the majority of their attended sessions on the ABS module. Of the sessions that Melissa attended, she found the vault and budget sessions to be the most beneficial. These sessions provided some processes that the accounting department can utilize in the future. Another session that she found value in attending was regarding future releases. This showed Page 1 of 2 106