An information system migration framework for the electricity industry control centers

Sammanfattning: The Electricity Industry Reforms (EIR) is a worldwidephenomenon that is inducing an intensive business orientedcontext in the organization, processes and functions of theElectricity Industry (EI). The electric power grid is nowtreated as the electricity market, the consumer as thecustomer, the power system activities are related to marketactors (i.e. generators, distributors and retailers) and theElectricity Industry Control Centers (EICC) provide theessential coordination and economic trade functions andtransactions.The EICC are looking for solutions to introduce, amongstothers, emerging information processes in the business orientedcontext with all the Electricity Industry actors without losingthe technical reliability of the EI. The EIR is delineated as amajor change on the traditional EI relying heavily oninformation exchange amongst the market actors.In the Central American countries, these EIR started around1996. The EICC in this region are facing the demanded changeswith information legacy systems, in operation long time beforethe EIR and considered already obsolete.This thesis exploresand summarizes, as a researchcontribution, the main problems at the EICCs in CentralAmerica, in managing the incorporation of emerging informationproc-esses.An Information System Migration Framework (ISMF) for theEICC is proposed as a re-search contribution and solution tothe problems identified. The ISMF here presented provides a setof steps and guidelines to follow for managing any emerginginformation processes in a systematic, feasible and reliableway. The ISMF is a continuous description of emerginginformation processes, risk assessments, requirementelicitation and specifica-tions with traceable and incrementalimplementations without completely replacing the system. TheISMF has as fundamental characteristic that provides a feasibleview of the current operation of the EICC, a continuous anditerative process of controlled changes and a systematicprocess to update the EICC operation model with a set of stepsthat are implementation independent, technology independent,process ori-ented and user centered.The ISMF?s feasibility, replicability and useracceptance has partially tested at the EICC in El Salvador andNicaragua.Key words:Electricity Industry, Electricity IndustryReforms, Electricity Industry Control Centers, InformationSystem Migration, Information Systems Modeling andRequirements, Case Studies in the Electricity Industry inCentral America.