Recently, Jimmy Kimmel challenged viewers of his show to wait for a crucial moment during the Super Bowl, then unplug their TV sets and record the reactions of spouses, family and friends as the screen went black. The playback was hilarious for Kimmel viewers, though the collective response from the victims of the prank was less than jovial.

At least those fans were able to plug their sets back in and resume watching; residents of a small New England town were not as lucky. They lost power during the first quarter and didn’t see it restored until the game was nearly over. The Public Service Company of New Hampshire (PSNH) would later explain that a faulty underground cable caused the outage that resulted in 300 Patriots fans missing the bulk of the Super Bowl.

PSNH may have saved the game if it had leveraged Business Analytics Optimization (BAO). BAO encapsulates expert organizational knowledge and insight and automates real time decisions at the point of greatest impact, based on real time fluid data. With the new platform approach to BAO, known as BAOP, companies have a unified, cohesive view with “actors” replicating each and every system, device and touch point that can affect the business process. In the case of PSNH’s faulty cable joint, an actor would have detected a maintenance issue based on pre-determined factors, and already-established actions could have then addressed the problem by rerouting data or alerting maintenance crews well in advance of an actual event.

We hope that, in the future, more utilities will have solutions in place that enable them to take action preemptively so that no sports fan has to endure what the residents of Rye, New Hampshire went through. Their lights came on just in time for them to see the Giants score the game-winning touchdown.