Beyond GIS - a New Level of Integration

Types of Spatial/Network Applications
AM/FM/GIS
Major applications of AM/FM/GIS in a typical utility or telecommunications company typically include:

Planning and design of network changes: this requires the ability to handle so called “long transactions”, in which the changes made by a designer are not visible to other users of the system until it is appropriate - which may be days or weeks (see Newell and Easterfield, 1990).
Detailed map production: maps which show the exact location of facilities relative to detailed landbase data are usually a product of the AM/FM/GIS. This is the most detailed level of data which is required by any of the spatial/network applications.
Asset management: this function maybe partly or wholly carried out within the AM/FM/GIS, covering areas such as inspection and maintenance information, tracking asset value and utilization, etc.

These kinds of traditional AM/FM/GIS applications are generally not mission-critical systems which need to be running 7 days a week, 24 hours a day.

Outage Management
Outage management has a high profile in the electric industry. It involves analyzing calls from customers to identify probable failing devices and dispatching crews to fix these problems. The ability to handle dynamic network switching, and to track outage history for customers and devices, are other key requirements. In telecommunications, dispatch aspects of the application are similar, but device predictions are typically generated by devices themselves sending alarms across the network.

This is a short transaction application, in which any changes (for example, to the outage status of a customer) should be visible to all users immediately. This is in contrast to the design environment mentioned in the previous section, where changes made by a designer should not be propagated to all users immediately.