Under today's rapid change environment, utilities must now redirect their attention beyond their traditional domains and face a new economic challenge to provide their services at the lowest possible cost. The evolving state-of-the-art of control systems and database management systems, and how these are deployed and made available to the organization, has created a whole new opportunity to manage costs as an aspect to utility performance tracking and optimization. Although investing in technology can be difficult during periods when budgets are being slashed as revenues decline, the "payback" in technology can be significant and can only be fully realized when both staff and the organization are able to leverage technology for optimizing work practices and improving performance and reliability. As such, work practice optimization, capture of organizational knowledge and use of data from information systems are critical elements in using performance measurement systems to manage utility activities. The aspects of efficient cost and resource tracking; storing and retrieving the "knowledge-component" of an organization - coupled with powerful decision-support tools, represent the full capabilities and tremendous payback that technology investments can provide. This paper discusses information management solution investment strategies that include: IT fitness assessment; defining the future; the power of integration; and, implementation and technical support considerations. Includes figures.