CHICAGO, March 1, 2017 – SDI (SDI Presence LLC), the mission-critical IT systems integrator, announces that utility industry veteran Joe Felicicchia has joined the firm as Vice President – Utility Industry Services. Felicicchia, who brings over 25 years of utility experience having held past positions at People’s Gas and North Shore Gas, will lead SDI’s growing utility portfolio of projects.
“We welcome Joe as the firm’s involvement with utility critical infrastructure expands,” states SDI CEO David Gupta. “The firm has a core expertise in the high-demand, complex systems called for in advanced technologies that utilities are needing to deploy, such as AMI, Smart Grid, and DER initiatives, keeping in mind the security concerns that come with such deployments. Joe has a great blend of operational experience and technical expertise to help guide our clients with leveraging technology throughout the meter data life cycle and beyond.”
Prior to SDI, Joe served as General Manager for North Shore Gas Company, a Northern Illinois utility covering approximately 250 square miles and serving approximately 159,000 customers. Managing a $50M budget, Joe led over 175 non-union and union employees and multiple contractors across all construction, engineering, and operations functions at the utility. Joe managed relationships with senior leadership, city and state government officials, key accounts, and union officials while leading key safety initiatives for the Illinois Utilities of WEC Energies Group.
“Seeing the move to advanced technologies in the utility industry and the challenges that it brings makes this move to SDI an easy one,” states Felicicchia. “SDI’s appreciation for complex and critical IT environments and the Team’s ability to apply transformational technologies like cloud, mobile, and customer and operations data management will be a great resource for utilities as they strive to engage more with their customers and keep up with ever-changing regulations. And the firm’s MBE status affords utility clients with another way to meet their procurement objectives at the same time.”
Prior to his GM role, Joe led the People’s Business Technology group, where he engineered the move of all the utility’s operations technology applications (including mobile data system and customer information system) and mobile hardware and the wireless communications technology into a centralized IT support portfolio -model. Peoples Gas is the natural gas provider for the City of Chicago serving about 828,000 accounts. This newly created IT services group acts as an intermediary between Operations and back office IT, running upgrade projects, taking care of break-fix, providing data analysis, and conducting applications training, all with a keen understanding of the business.
Joe led several utility-wide IT deployments including rolling out a mobile data system to 500+ field users across 8 field locations in conjunction with a new customer information system; revamping an enterprise utility e-commerce platform to conform with industry standards for security, redundancy, and disaster recovery; remediating an enterprise work and asset management system; and deploying wireless technology to utility yards, fleet, and Emergency Response Vehicles to dramatically increase field productivity, reduce costs and better support operations and customer relations functions remotely. For several years, Joe served as IT Infrastructure Manager with a $20M budget, responsible for all customer-facing aspects of IT, end-user computing (approximately 2000 nodes - desktop, laptops, and mobile PC's), help desk, asset management, e-commerce, wireless communications, mobile technology, and software delivery support.
Joe also brings a utility construction and operations management background, having responsibility for a $100M portfolio of construction projects at Peoples Gas including an accelerated main replacement and public gas infrastructure improvement projects. He also served as Operations Manager at Peoples where he provided primary leadership for over 250 field employees and was responsible for emergency response and all regulatory and customer-facing functions.
Joe is an active member of the Midwest Energy Association (MEA) and has spoken at several American Gas Association (AGA) technology events. Reinforcing SDI's community values, Joe has participated in several local philanthropies, including the Great Lakes Adaptive Sports Association (GLASA), which empowers youth, adults, and injured military personnel with physical and visual disabilities to be healthy and active through sports and recreation participation. As part of NSG and Peoples, he helped organize and/or participated in numerous community events, such as teaming up with the Community Action Partnership of Lake County to rehab homes for homeless veterans to weatherizing homes for the elderly come wintertime. Joe is a diligent fundraiser for charitable efforts such as the Polar Plunge, which benefits Special Olympics.
Joe Felicicchia will work out of SDI’s LA office and can be reached at jfeliccicchia@sdipresence.com and 847.302.3265.
About SDI (SDI Presence LLC)
Mission-critical systems integrator SDI delivers intelligent technology solutions to ensure client operational performance, security and revenue generation. With a 20-year corporate resume, SDI addresses the higher IT demands of critical environments to deliver zero downtime, enhanced security and risk mitigation strategies. SDI is a certified Minority Business Enterprise (MBE), with a portfolio of clients includes some of the nation’s largest airports, commercial real estate portfolios and national banks and financial services organizations. SDI delivers deep technical expertise with an agile delivery model focused on complete customer satisfaction. Visit us at https://www.sdipresence.com and follow us on LinkedIn: SDI Presence and Twitter: @SDIPresence
For media inquiries, please contact:
Dawn Nash Pfeiffer
Chief Marketing Officer
312.580.7516
mailto:dpfeiffer@sdipresence.com
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