Technology partner for utility general managers

You are accountable for a system that has to run continuously and for a budget that has to be defended in public. In a single week that can mean a pump station alarm at two in the morning, a permit report due to the state regulator, a customer disputing a bill that changed after a meter replacement, and a board member asking why the capital plan grew since the last cycle. The utility runs control systems that operations staff treat as off limits for good reason, a customer information system that finance depends on for cash flow, a GIS that is mostly accurate, an asset management system that was populated thoroughly for some asset classes and barely at all for others, and a set of spreadsheets holding everything the systems could not.

Technology reaches you from several directions at once. A metering vendor proposes an upgrade. The billing system vendor announces an end of support date. The insurance carrier sends a questionnaire asking whether control networks are separated from business networks and whether backups have been restored and tested. A state or federal funding program attaches reporting conditions to a loan or a grant. Meanwhile every dollar comes from rates, so each purchase has to be explainable to ratepayers and to a board in terms of service, compliance, or risk, and each one adds something staff will have to operate long after the project closes.

What makes this hard

Control systems and business systems keep converging, while the people who can approve a change on the control network, the integrator and the operations staff, are not the people being asked to answer for segmentation and vendor remote access.
Advanced metering records interval data continuously, but most of it stays inside the head-end system, unavailable for leak detection, outage detection, water loss analysis, or rate design.
Replacing a customer information and billing system is the highest risk project the utility will run, because a poor cutover shows up immediately in cash collections and in the call queue.
Recurring compliance work stacks up: discharge monitoring under a National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permit, drinking water quality reporting, service line inventory updates under the federal lead rules, and, for community water systems above a population threshold, periodic recertification of risk and resilience assessments and emergency response plans.
Board and ratepayer questions require consumption, asset condition, and cost data pulled from systems that disagree with each other about which service address belongs to which meter, which account, and which main.
Cybersecurity expectations for critical infrastructure continue to rise while much of the control equipment cannot be patched on an IT schedule and cannot be taken out of service for testing.
Institutional knowledge concentrates in a small number of long-tenured staff, and the report writer, the SCADA programmer, and the person who understands the rate tables in the billing system are often the same short list of names.

How HQT helps

Build an inventory of control and business systems, document how they actually connect, and design segmentation and a monitored, multi-factor remote access path for vendors, working with your integrator and operations staff and inside their change windows.
Stand up a data platform that holds interval meter data, historian extracts, work orders, and asset condition together, so leak and outage analysis, water loss audits, and rate studies draw from the same source rather than from separate exports.
Build and monitor the integrations between the customer information system, GIS, asset management, and work order or outage systems, including reconciliation of service addresses and asset identifiers, with alerting so a broken interface is found before a customer finds it.
Write requirements, evaluation criteria, and data conversion plans for billing, asset management, or work order replacements, and serve as the utility's own technical representative through implementation, testing, and acceptance.
Automate the assembly of recurring regulatory and board reports so every figure traces back to its source system and the submittal no longer depends on one person's spreadsheet.
Deliver customer-facing services such as usage and billing portals, payment options, and outage and conservation notifications, built to the accessibility expectations that apply to public agencies and scoped to keep payment card handling contained.
Test the recovery side of the house: backup and restoration for control system configuration and business systems, an incident response plan that includes manual operation procedures, and tabletop exercises run with operations and IT in the same room.

How work with a utility usually starts

Work rarely starts with a plan for the whole utility. It starts with something that has a date attached. A billing system reaches an announced end of support. A metering deployment finishes and the data has nowhere to go. An insurance renewal or a board member's question forces a straight answer about whether the control network is separated from the business network. A compliance submittal consumes weeks of staff time and is due again next cycle. A rate study begins and the consultant asks for consumption and asset data the utility cannot produce cleanly.

The first piece of work is usually a short assessment written in the utility's own terms: what systems exist, what data moves between them and by what mechanism, who maintains each one, which interfaces are undocumented, and which routine tasks depend on a person rather than a process. That means time with the operators, the billing supervisor, the GIS analyst, and whoever prepares the reports, because the workflow on paper and the workflow in practice differ at every utility.

From there the work is divided into pieces that fit your approval thresholds and your staff's capacity to absorb change. A segmentation design and a documented vendor remote access path can proceed while a billing replacement is still years away. A reporting automation can be delivered inside one budget cycle. Sequencing matters more than scope, because a utility cannot pause operations while its systems change underneath it.

What to ask any technology partner

How will you work around operations? Ask who decides whether a change is safe on the control side, how work is scheduled around treatment and distribution operations, and what the rollback plan is. A firm that treats an engineering workstation like an office desktop does not belong on your control network.
Where does our data live and how do we get it back? Ask for export formats, retention, and a written statement of data ownership. This matters most for meter data and for anything a future vendor will have to convert.
Who operates this after you leave? Ask for documentation, runbooks, and named staff training as deliverables rather than closeout tasks. Utilities keep systems for a long time and staffing turns over.
How will we know when it breaks? Integrations fail quietly. Ask what monitoring and alerting come with the work, and who receives the alert at two in the morning.
What will it cost to run? Licensing, cloud consumption, and staff time belong in the rate model, not only in the project budget.
What do you not do? A firm claiming equal depth in control system programming, billing implementation, GIS, and security assessment is describing a sales approach rather than a practice.

HQT works on the software, data, integration, and security side of public utilities, alongside the control system integrators and platform vendors an agency already relies on.

Frequently asked questions

We already have a control system integrator. Where does a firm like HQT fit?

The integrator owns the control system itself: the controllers, the operator interface, and any change that affects the process. HQT works on the surrounding software and network questions, including segmentation between control and business networks, monitored remote access, extracting historian and meter data, and the business systems that consume that data. The division of responsibility is written down before work begins, and anything touching process control goes through your integrator and your operations staff.

Our IT support comes from the city rather than the utility. Does that change the engagement?

It usually means two sets of standards and two approval paths. We work inside the city's identity, network, and security standards and document where the utility's operational requirements differ, particularly on availability and change control. Naming the decision maker for each system at the start prevents most of the friction that otherwise surfaces mid-project.

Can you help us justify a rate adjustment to the board?

We do not perform cost of service or rate studies. That work belongs to your rate consultant and finance staff. What we do is make the underlying data available and traceable: consumption by customer class from meter data, asset condition and replacement history from asset management and work orders, and operating costs from finance, assembled so each figure in the study can be traced back to its source. Rate procedures vary by state, and in California, Proposition 218 sets notice and protest requirements for property-related fees such as water and sewer charges.

How do we improve cybersecurity when much of the equipment cannot be patched?

Patching is one control among many and often the least available one in operational technology. Compensating controls carry more weight: an accurate device inventory, network segmentation, controlled and logged remote access, elimination of default and shared credentials, passive monitoring that does not disturb control traffic, tested configuration backups, and an incident response plan that includes running the plant manually. Federal and sector guidance, along with standards such as ISA/IEC 62443, give a structure for prioritizing that work, and requirements differ depending on whether the utility is a water system, a distribution-only electric utility, or registered for bulk electric system functions.

How small can a first project reasonably be?

Small enough to fit under your board's approval threshold and to finish within a budget cycle. A systems and interface inventory, a segmentation design, a reporting automation, or a clean data extract from the metering head-end are each reasonable starting points. Utilities that begin there end up with a documented picture of their environment, which makes the larger decisions, such as a billing replacement, easier to scope and easier to defend in public.