86 THE POWER OF POSSIBILITY NISC | 50 YEARS OF INNOVATION AND MEMBER SERVICE When trouble shooting / problem solving, our field personnel are learning more about the powerful features in AppSuite. Another feature that would be extremely helpful would be the ability to view outage history. Is this on the AppSuite road map? A stream of other Members agreed they wanted to be able to see outage history when looking at a customer account. NISC Engineering Support Team Lead Leslie Boyd gathered more details and use case infor- mation from Members, and a few months later, Tracy Langston, a Product Line Manager, announced that the next monthly update of AppSuite would include that feature. Does anyone have a brochure or a nicely designed info sheet to hand out to customers with step-by-step instructions on how to use SmartHub? A Member posted a file that their organization used as a trifold brochure inserted into bills. Do you wish that your customers could port their numbers in without calling into the office? Now they can. SmartHub Order Management now has the ability to process Port-In Connect orders. If this interests you, NISC’s graphics-based, user-friendly Outage Management System actually predates iVUE. Soon after the merger, developers wrote the software in the Java programming language as a kind of proof of concept to show how it would reshape the Member experience. But the release of AppSuite in 2012, with a unique mobile platform, was a real game-changer. “We’re one of only a few [companies] that can truly claim to have a world-class enterprise solution that enables a smarter grid and a smarter utility,” says David Bonnett, Vice President of Product Management. EVERY QUESTION HAS AN ANSWER IN THE NISC COMMUNITY Think of a place where you can share the latest company news, congrat- ulate a co-worker who just had a baby, give some tips to a Member and connect with the latest training on a new product. This is a virtual spot — you don’t have to leave your desk and hang around the office coffeepot. The NISC Community is just a few clicks away. In 2009 NISC launched the Community as a way to share information and build connections. It has since become an indispensable tool for employees and Members, with about 26,000 registered users. In a section of the Community dedicated for Member use and infor- mation, Members can pose questions, read about NISC products, prepare for software updates and access online training stored in Pathways, NISC’s learning portal. NISC employees monitor the Member site so that they can respond to questions. Thanks to the technology upgrades, average outage times have declined from about two and one-half hours to an hour, says Chet Aubin, CEO of Johnson County REMC in Franklin, Indiana, and a former Board member of CADP and NISC. “There are times we go out and restore a customer’s power and they don’t even know they’ve been off,” he says. Telecom Members have gained great efficiencies as well. As they added new services, such as broadband options and television programming bundles, they needed an easy way to make changes. SwitchTalk2 , released in 2011, enabled customer service representatives to connect or disconnect