AM/FM/GIS makes a 180-Degree turn

Introduction
Forward thinking corporations have long understood the potential value of adding the geospatial dimension to their corporate data. The ability to provide, organize, and display data geographically gives immediate insight into many difficult problems companies face. Appropriate distribution of plant to provide services, dispatching to repair faults, forecasting where growth will occur and planning to meet the demands and opportunities of that growth are just some of the areas where geographic information is invaluable. With the increasing pressure among utility companies to compete for new business based on the ability to add new services quickly and respond to customer requests and complaints, the advantage of an accurate and responsive geospatial database is hard to underestimate.

Enterprose Geographics
The highest value to be gained in adding geospatial data to the corporation is found when the geographic data can be added in to the corporate database directly. There it is accessible to the entire enterprise, providing value not only to engineering, but to finance, work management, marketing and corporate planning. Given the obvious value of having geospatial data about the corporate assets in the corporate database, why are so many GIS solutions at best only located in the engineering department, on isolated proprietary systems? Why do so many attempts at bringing GIS into the enterprise fail to deliver the promised payback, or worse, fail to reach full production status at all?

Until recently even the successful implementors of GIS have relied on proprietary solutions for providing the geospatial analysis and management of the geometry. The great hope of bringing the geospatial characteristics of the corporate data into the enterprise were not being realized, since accessing spatial data required not only specialized processors, but access to separate data management systems. The geometry itself and its relationships were difficult if not impossible to represent in the standard corporate relational database.