The current energy and environmental information management systems in place create several significant costs and risks, including failure to institutionalize business processes, time-intensive data reporting, significant maintenance costs, poor access to information, lost analytical value, and data reporting inaccuracies. Company managers needed a consolidated data gathering system that could connect to corporate databases and streamline management efforts.

PPC described the client’s current energy and environmental management processes. These descriptions were turned into requirement and technology gap documentation. Adhering to a disciplined evaluation methodology, PPC analyzed numerous combinations of technology solutions and made recommendations about solutions that most directly matched the client's data needs, risk and cost thresholds. In addition, understanding that no technology solution can be successful without people, processes, and governance, PPC's recommendation addressed these important aspects of the solution framework.

To generate the requirements and technology gap documents, PPC's management analysts gathered data from stakeholders in the company who had key roles in information and people management as well as process and governance. These stakeholders were interviewed and asked to describe their activities including technologies they used, manual data manipulation they performed, features they wanted to see in new management technologies, their processes and interactions with other people and departments, and their position in the governance hierarchy. The results of this data gathering were written into requirements documents and analyzed to highlight gaps in technology, people, process, and governance.

The detailed requirements and gap documents served as the source for most of the evaluation criteria in the technology evaluation methodology. As necessary additional evaluation criteria to consider cost and risk thresholds defined by the client are proposed for the methodology. The U.S. Chief Information Officer's Value Measuring Methodology for information technology assessment was used to perform the feasibility study. This methodology scored each information technology solution based on a combination of scores from technical experts from PPC's information technology departments in combination with weights of the importance of an evaluation criteria provided by client stakeholders.

PPC researched market surveys to gather information about technologies to assess in the evaluation. In addition, during the evaluation process technology providers were engaged for meetings and demonstrations, to better understand the solution and, risks and costs associated with the technology. Working closely together, PPC's business and technical analysts work through the results of the evaluation methodology and document their recommendations to the client.

PPC submitted a feasibility study to managers at the Fortune 50 company that clearly relayed the interests of stakeholders in energy and environmental information management, and defined business requirements and gaps in technology, people, process and governance. Analysis and evaluation of best-fit solutions to the challenges the company faced for energy and environmental management allowed the company to understand the options available to them to streamline and optimize their management efforts. With this information the company could better understand where unnecessary processes and technologies lay, where technologies were needed to solve issues of manual data manipulation and to institutionalize technical knowledge, and where excess costs were being created and risks threatened efficiency in data management, process and governance.