From Smart Meter Data to Pricing Intelligence - Visual Data Mining towards Real-Time BI

The deployment of smart metering in the electricity industry has opened up the opportunity for real-time BI-enabled innovative business applications, such as demand response. Taking a holistic view of BI, this study introduced a visual data mining driven application in order to exemplify the potentials of real-time BI to the electricity businesses. The empirical findings indicate that such an application is capable of extracting actionable insights about customer’s electricity consumption patterns, which will lead to turn timely measured data into pricing intelligence. Based on the findings, we proposed a real-time BI framework, and discussed how it will facilitate the formulation of strategic initiatives for transforming the electricity utility towards sustainable growth. Our research is conducted by following the design science research paradigm. By addressing an emerging issue in the problem domain, it adds empirical knowledge to the BI research landscape.