By Amanda Durish Cook
CARMEL, Ind. — A quarterly IT scorecard audit has uncovered three technology-related issues for MISO staff to address.
In light of the audit, MISO will review a nine-hour website outage, continue to ensure that ex-employees don’t have system access 24 hours beyond their departure and commit more time to building its own settlement software system, the Technology Committee of the Board of Directors learned during a June 15 conference call.
MISO Technology Executive Kevin Caringer said the RTO will need an additional $390,000 to build its own settlement system software because staff were in some cases required to reverse-engineer the existing system to find original settlement software code.
Director Baljit Dail said the RTO should have all software code already documented as standard practice. “It gets into a very scary place where we want to change the code but we don’t know what the original code is or what it does,” he said.
Caringer said MISO had a majority of the original code and will run the old and new code in parallel for a few days until determining the success of the RTO-built system. If the new code fails, MISO will revert to the old code.
“We have done this in the past in the RTO as well for other major changes. It’s something we’re familiar with,” Caringer said.
He also noted that MISO will use the software to implement five-minute real-time settlements, which are expected in January.
The RTO meanwhile continues to strive to terminate the system access of former employees within 24 hours, Chief Information Officer Keri Glitch said.
“We are moving on a positive trajectory, and I have confidence we’ll continue moving forward,” Glitch said.
MISO has consistently scored near 100% in timely access terminations since February, up from a low of 42% in November. The RTO said access termination issues can arise when a third-party vendor fails to notify it when a contractor leaves.
Dail asked if MISO has any recourse if a vendor fails to alert it of exiting contractors.
Glitch said the RTO is developing new contract language setting out a procedure for vendors to notify it and terminate access.
The RTO is also reviewing a nine-hour public website outage that occurred from 4 p.m. to 1 a.m. on a Friday evening in March, after a physical network device failed and an employee exacerbated the situation by improperly configuring a switch-over to a backup device — leading to the outage.
“It appeared to be a human error,” Glitch said, adding that hardware components on critical network switches rarely fail.
Glitch said MISO is conducting a review of overall network design and failover capabilities when third-party vendors are involved.
