Building a solid foundation

As the old saying goes, nothing’s certain but death, taxes, and upgrades. Software upgrades — the process of migrating an existing system from one version of software to a new version — are inevitable in today’s information technology environment. In the GIS world, upgrades can be brought on by any number of reasons. Some of the most common reasons include:

Losing support for the current version of software
Conforming to a new company standard due to mergers and acquisitions
Having a vendor go out of business
Requiring support of new business initiatives
Upgrading to interfacing systems or underlying software versions (RDBMS, OS, etc.)

Over the past 15 to 20 years, most utilities have implemented a GIS of some sort. The functionality ranges from simple automated mapping functions with the main users being mapping technicians, to a GIS that is fully integrated with a company’s business processes and corporate information technologies with users from all areas of a company.

Needless to say, most utility’s GISs are closer in functionality to the former example than the latter. In the past 5 to 7 years, however, utilities have been increasingly involved in performing large-scale upgrades to their existing GISs to move rapidly toward an integrated business paradigm. In most cases, when major upgrades (e.g., changing GIS vendors, moving to new major software point release, changing data models, etc.) are performed, a utility takes the opportunity to rethink processes and various implementation issues and fix mistakes that they made the first time through. Many of these “If I were to do it all over again” mistakes often revolve around data. The objectives of this paper and subsequent presentation are to evaluate and build on the experience of those who have had a chance to ask the question, “If I were to do it again, I would . . . ” and

Learn what the common data-related mistakes have been.
Identify and prioritize areas for upgrading existing GIS data to support the strategic business needs of the future.
Identify strategies for moving forward — whether it is upgrading an existing GIS or implementing a GIS for the first time.

Startegic Directions
Before one can determine what types of data-related upgrades need to be implemented, two things should happen:

Define, at least at a high-level, the long-term vision for your GIS’s future — how do you envision using GIS in your corporate business processes?
Perform a facilities data quality assessment to understand what data exists and its quality.

In general, the following trends are occurring in the utility industry relative to GIS:

Trends in Utilities Affecting GIS (from left to right)
Weak business process/technology integration	Process centric . data and systems must support a rapidly changing business environment
Departmentalized, non-integrated systems or point-to-point integration	Cross-functional applications based on process models; GISs integrated with many other corporate systems including outage, work management, CIS, network analysis, etc.; increasing use of middleware technologies for integration
Extensive custom software	Configuration of commercial off-the-shelf products or configurable solutions, minimize customization
Islands of information	Consolidation and integration of multiple data sources, treating and managing data as key corporate asset
Limited access to operations data	Corporate wide access, intranet and Internet, still heavily dependent on back-office systems and data quality
GISs primarily mapping and facilities information management systems with access limited to a few people	Wide range of applications supporting all areas of utility with wide access throughout utility
Stand-alone planning functions and technologies	Integrated planning functions
Risk averse	Much more risk tolerant and seeking new business opportunities, business transformation-focused

The trends can be graphically shown as follows:

In general, GISs these days are considered the facility asset registry for utilities. The GISs are no longer being implemented as stand-alone systems supporting mapping and limited facilities management applications. They are becoming mission-critical systems that must integrate with a wide-range of other technologies/systems to support ever-changing business processes.