HOW ELECTRIC CO-OP MANAGEMENT AND STAFF CAN USE COOPERATIVE.COM.

• Author: Kimball, Donald W.
• Position: Brief Article

Preparing for the start of open competition in Arizona has required many changes at Arizona Electric Power Cooperative over the last 10 years. To implement those changes, AEPCO management has aggressively turned to new communications tools and technologies that could help us develop empowered employees. We're doing this because we believe AEPCO employees will be our primary competitive advantage in the competitive environment.

Research has identified four keys to empowering employees. We must provide:

1) Access to real-time information about the organization's performance,

2) Access to real-time information about the industry to help employees "see the bigger picture" in our industry,

3) A clear understanding of how individual efforts and jobs effect the success of the organization and the bottom line, and

4) Incentives clearly tied to the success of our organization.

Cooperative.com is a tool that's starting to help us empower our employees in two of these areas.

For starters, it provides employees with access to industry news that can help them learn how other utilities and cooperatives are meeting the challenges of competition. When they combine this knowledge with internal information about AEPCO's performance, Cooperative.com has helped them discover how we're doing compared to others -- how we measure up. Finally, and perhaps most important, Cooperative.com provides our employees with communications tools and links that allow them to tap into the national network of knowledge and resources electric cooperatives have developed over more than 60 years.

With more than 35 years of electric cooperative experience, I'm confident that with most of the problems a co-op employee faces there is always someone at another electric cooperative working to solve the same challenge. Cooperative.com provides the communications link that can help us solve those problems the cooperative way -- sharing knowledge and working together.

For example, just consider how Cooperative.com's search-engine enables you to quickly access information generated at co-ops across the country. Pick a topic you're interested in, say "distributed generation," select the "other co-ops" option, and you'll get a list of articles on that topic that electric co-ops have posted to their Web sites. Without this capability, you'd have to visit each co-op's Web site one-by-one to track down any posting on the topic. No comparison!

Before looking at the various resources...