Yes, there is life on MARS! ... A journey towards an enterprise-wide geospatial information& technology solution

Today’s World and Business Realities
Many of us who grew up in the utility business during the 1970’s and 1980’s have found that today’s realities are more than slight paradigm shift, they are dramatic and unsettling at times. The legal monopolies of yesteryear where we proposed rate increases to cover cost increases and plant additions and expansions to each state’s public service commission have been replaced in large part with competition and customer choice. Customers can not be taken for granted anymore. As utilities, telecommunication companies, public works agencies, and other infrastructure-based entities we need information. We are after market intelligence information, marketing strategies and campaigns, the utilization of customer care systems to get closer to the needs of the customer, work management systems for operational efficiency, GIS for planning, and a host of other enterprise-wide tools that can help us retain and attract new customers. Government is also under closer scrutiny today. Raising taxes to covercosts has been replaced with doing a better job with the resources available. Customer and taxpayer expectations have never been higher.

Also changing is the functional structure within our organizations. These “silos” have been replaced with various processes that are at the core of the business. This does not mean that organizations naturally fall into this method of organization. After all, trained behaviors are always harder to change than newly learned ones. Specialties that have been replaced by multiple process dependencies on others is more difficult to deal with than getting work done within a specialty e.g. Marketing, Engineering, Operations. While this is true we all need to change. This includes learning new skills, learning to depend on one another, and the elimination of steps that are not needed by the customer or client. The marketplace will determine which companies excel in the transformation to a customer-focused entity. An integral part of the New World order is the development of integrated systems that assist organizations to capture much needed efficiencies.