Value of Geo-Spatial Technology in a Utility a Statisical Approach

The GIS Control Group
Choosing the groups to be measured was difficult. The first thought was to measure utilities with GIS against those without. This turned out to be impossible because:

information published by the industry watchers is very unreliable
companies doing a pilot on an R&D budget are often represented as being installed
there is no differentiation between companies doing CAD mapping and those doing enterprise GIS
those with a demographic system in the marketing department look the same as those doing comprehensive infrastructure management.

The team decided to use the only reliably screened information available — gita award winners; because these companies had been screened by documented criteria to win the award. It was further decided that recently implemented award winners may not have had time for the full impact of the system to hit the bottom line. Therefore, the group was reduced to those who had won the award more than four years ago. The companies in the GIS group were as follows:

Public Service Company of Colorado
San Diego Gas & Electric
Detroit Edison
Texas Utilities
Illinois Power

The team decided the most valid comparison would be the average of the award winning companies against all the remaining companies in the studies. This eliminated any judgment as to what constituted an acceptable AM/FM/GIS implementation.