Stop your GIS project now!
William J. Meehan
P.E.,Boston Edison Company
800 Boylston Street Boston, MA 02199
Introduction
Boston Edison completed its "classic" GIS on time and on budget on December31, 1996. Big
deal! It won the GITA International award in April of 1998. So what? Boston Edison has
streamlined its facility mapping operations by an order of magnitude, Yawn. Has it improved the
records? Sure. Have applications such as trouble mapping, one call digging applications improved
operations. Certainly. Has the GIS investment radically changed the business? No. The reason:
GIS is not a business process in the electric utility business. Nor does it directly touch customers.
A customer touchpoint is a transaction that involves a direct contact between a customer and the
company. A business process ol?en starts with a customer touchpoint and is completed when there
is customer satisfaction. Instead, a "classic" GIS project creates a thing, an entity that was not
there before. It then has to be managed and fed. Stop the GIS project now, before the thing gets
hungrier.
The vision of electric utility GIS projects and the AM/FM projects that preceded them was to add a
spatial and graphical representation to facility information. The idea was that this would help
better manage facility assets, locate troubles, design new systems and analyze the electric
distribution system. A GIS can help visualize information, but to do it effectively, the data must
be combined with other information from other systems. So, to meet the vision of a GIS, it must
be integrated with other systems. Since a GIS does not serve business process, per se, integration
is awkward, since it is often not clear what functions are included in the GIS and what functions
are included in other business process applications. This has lead to duplication of data and of
functions. If data resides in more than one place, managing changes is tough..
Evolution of Boston edison's GIS project
I wrote the original prototype functional specification for the GIS project (called CAD-Image) in
1986. The first significant activity, the pilot project began in 1989 and was completed late in 1990.
Analysis, justifications and lobbying for full implementation occurred during 1991. Full project
implementation was authorized in 1992. December of 1999 was to be the original in-service date
for the complete system. Thus the total time from original concept to completion would be (if
completed according to plan) a whopping 14 years! We accelerated the plan to the end of 1996.
The project took 10 years: three presidents, several completed wars, a total upheaval of the electric power industry, at least 5 generations of PC's, the fall and rise of the US auto industry and the
deregulation of the telephone industry. The bad news is that after all of that, we still haven't really
leveraged the fhll power of spatial information. The good news is that the groundwork has been
done. That groundwork is very valuable and of great strategic value. The groundwork looks like
this:
Landbase: -600 square miles, dense urban and suburban including the City of Boston and 39
surrounding cities and towns were converted to digital form at an accuracy of plus or minus 2?4
foot. Captured features include street legal right of way, paved ways, building outlines,
waterways, railroads, bridges and survey control. It was developed from aerial photography,
steriodigitization and city and town assessor maps.
Structures: - poles, manholes, padmounts, duct banks, conduit, vaults, boxes were converted from
paper form to digital form and registered to the landbase.
Electrical facilities: - primary, secondary electrical, services and streetlights were converted from
old maps, registered to the landbase and structures.
Customers:- meter locations were registered to the electrical conductors
Data Base Structure:- the database structure that defined the relationship of the landbase, street
centerlines, electrical structures, electrical equipment were established. The relationship of
underground conduit to conductors and equipment was modeled.
Data Maintenance Applications:- applications were created to keep the data and relationships up
to date.
Production Applications:- mapping, viewing, plotting, "Dig Safe (underground facility marking
for digging contractors) Management", pole inspection, work order posting, underground cable
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routing and viewing trouble calls were created. These applications live within the confines of our
current GIS.
Host Based Structure:- the current GIS consists of host based GIS software running on a mid
range UNIX server. The facility attributes are managed by a commercial data base management
system running on the same server. The user interface is X-Window based. The user's PC is
essentially running a terminal session to the server.
