While this sounds innovative, it is an interim solution at best: “UK energy provider RWE npower is piloting an SMS smart metering service in a bid to improve services to its pre-pay customers. Rather than top up energy credit at a shop or other outlet and then physically plug their key or card into their meter, customers in the RWE npower trial are using their cell phones for the whole procedure. Following the same model as pay-as-you-go cell phones, customers recharge their account on their phone or over the internet, which prompts an SMS message to be automatically sent to update the meter.”

Someone explain to me why the customer needs to take an action here. The meter should talk directly to the utility and cc the customer–via SMS is fine, as would be email or smoke signal. But the utility and the meter should be in constant communication. The utility should offer a running view of consumption to the customer, so they can monitor levels of energy use. (Or telephone use, or water–there’s no reason why this should be limited to electricity or gas).

This is the flip side of information assurance–assuring that information is available at the appropriate time through the appropriate means of communication, and presented in a way that helps intelligent decision-making.

So, for UK government, the question is how do the people and organisations receive, view and transmit information and how can it be improved? Dashboards, running views, mash-ups, web chat–lots of possibilities here. Is anybody looking at them?