Troubles mount at EnergyAustralia as CIO leaves

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electricity

blog If you’re fond of a good enterprise IT disaster story (hell, Australia seems to have more of them than it can handle these days), you’d be well advised to check out a (paywalled) story published by The AustralianIT this morning about electricity retailer EnergyAustralia. The newspaper reports (we recommend you click here for the full story):

A troubled technology integration project at EnergyAustralia has seen its chief information officer resign and the company forced to spend more than $285 million just to keep the lights on.

It’s not the first time the utility has been in the headlines for IT-related disasters. Those of you with long memories will remember that back in February 2007 the utility had to scramble to restore critical data lost as a result of backup failures that went undetected at the time, in a situation which Gartner described at the time as “astronomical”. And there have been a handful of other times over the intervening years when I’ve personally been told of other hiccups here and there at the utility. Sounds like a bit of a fixer upper.

If you know further details about what’s going on at EA, please don’t hesitate to drop Delimiter a line using our anonymous tips form. Even we won’t know who you are.

Image credit: Andrea Kratzenberg, royalty free