Towards the Integration of Geospatial Information & Technology into an OSS Environment
Some utilities could see changes looming on their business horizon and they began to look ahead at how the enterprise could cut operating costs and improve efficiencies. These “performance enhancement initiatives,” as they were sometimes called, often started out focusing on technology improvements to speed up existing processes and procedures through automation.
Over time it became more evident that technology alone was not the ultimate solution to the looming operating expenses squeeze. First, the enterprise’s business processes themselves needed to be streamlined and where necessary, redesigned. Step one was to figure out what needed to be accomplished from a workflow standpoint, and only then could you answer the question of how to best get that done. Technology then becomes a set of enabling tools to facilitate getting work done. As a result, the original vision of an AM/FM/GIS system as an electronic bank of maps and records was shaped over time to a series of process improvement tools enabling more efficient workflow.
One path that some enterprises pursued at that time was to search for one monolithic, completely integrated work order/records management system. As long as business processes were being re-engineered, the argument went, they might as well all be hooked together into one comprehensive system. While this seemed like a viable solution, it was a plan fraught with difficulty and many projects design to create such monolithic systems collapsed under their ever increasing -- and therefore unachievable -- scope.
Other organizations realized no one comprehensive system could be created to meet all the work flow or operational needs of the enterprise. No one system could be created to do all the work, or handle all of the business transactions – and this became more true as the size of the enterprise increased. No one sub-system could be allowed to “stop working” while the perfect system was designed and implemented or the organization would grind to a halt. This means that ultimately a number of legacy systems remained in place, and were carried into the future.
Over time the AM/FM/GIS system began to be integrated with a lot of other corporate systems, but not necessarily with all of them at the same time. For example, the AM/FM/GIS system might retrieve its customer data from the customer information system. At the same time an outage management system, not connected to the GIS system would also get the same data from the customer information system.
|
