This is truly strange, given the old clich~ that 80% or more of data relates to location. In
some work that was undertaken in Germany recently, a group of utility companies was
asked to list their most important business processes and then to note those that required
GIS. Their list is shown in Table 1.
Table 1. Electric and GAS Business Processes (* denotes requires GIS)
| Customer-oriented Processes: |
|
* Meter Reading |
|
Contract Management |
|
Track Accounts Receivable |
|
* Handle Customer Inquiries I |
|
* Provide Customer Service I |
|
Technical Processes: |
|
* Plan and Coordinate Network Construction |
|
* Perform Maintenance |
|
* Fault Management |
|
* Generate House Connection I |
|
Supporting Processes: |
|
* Acquire and Manage Materials |
|
Provide new IT |
Although a small number of these processes can be addressed by products that can be
bought off-the-shelf, the tradition has been that these processes have been satisfied by
custom development or specialist applications. Apart from the GIS market there are also
markets for systems that address SCADA, Works and Asset Management, Hydraulic
Analysis, Power Simulation, Outage Management, Network Design and Documentation
and Circuit Provisioning in the communications industry.
Figure 1: Shared Network Model (Maintained by GIS)
All of these require a model of the network, which is the province of the GIS to manage
and maintain. In an ideal world, there would only be one representation of the network in
the organisation from which all of these systems could work. Although it may not be
practical to achieve this physically, it is essential to achieve at least a logically equivalent
state if serious problems of inconsistency and integrity are to be avoided.
The GIS is the system that owns, manages and maintains that single network model. It
is asking for trouble if two systems are allowed to update different representations of the
same network. Such architectures based on round-trip propagation of change can be very
difficult to maintain, unless a robust 2-way replication scheme is put in place. One-way-trip
replication from the GIS out to these other systems is the way to go, if the ideal of
these other systems directly accessing the GIS model cannot be achieved. The huge
benefit of this is that all of these systems that need to use a network do not themselves
need sophisticated systems to build and maintain that network. That is what the R&D
dollars of the GIS vendors have been spent on these past years. That these systems now
have a robust model with integrity to rely on increases their own value-added
contribution. It is a “one plus one equals three” argument. Not only does one model avoid
unnecessary duplication, but backup and recovery procedures become easier and one
development environment reduces development costs.
