I’ve Looked at GIS From Both Sides Now
Those of us that have had an opportunity to look at the bigger picture of the fully integrated utility can see the tremendous value to an organization of being able to leverage their GIS with other critical systems. After all, 80% of utility data is spatially oriented. And yet, if you ask a cross section of people within a utility what GIS is, you will most likely be greeted with a couple of stares and the reply that it must be something like a new line of athletic shoes. The complaints you hear from people in many organizations is the fact that they can’t get information they need to do their jobs more effectively. The call centers would love to know when fieldwork will be completed so they can answer customers’ questions. Dispatchers would love to have maps that are always current, and so forth. If everyone in the organization is interested in spatial data, why is it that some engineers and the operating people are the only ones that are familiar
with it? The customer care organization, among others, needs to be educated on GIS and the value it can bring to them. That’s why I’ve said this part of the process is more of a needs realization. Champions internal to the utility and providers of GIS services should look at expanding their education/communication efforts to include all departments that can benefit from better managing spatial data. When you have a meeting of the minds with the value of wider integration, it makes the next step of justification much easier.
Justification
In the old days (the mid 1980s), when we began to computerize a lot of our clerical activities and reports, justification was pretty simple. The cost savings of going from a manual task to an automated task easily justified the project. I managed a department during this time that was dedicated to the effort of leveraging the computer as a tool to improve reporting capability. This was also the time when you were really special if you were the first one in the department to get a PC. Previously, if you had anything, it was a dumb terminal. At he end of the 80s and the beginning of the 90s, we started looking at applications that were more than just the automating of manual tasks. GIS, or AM/FM as it was called back then, was one of these. There was now an opportunity for a bigger win. Not only was there an opportunity to utilize the computer as a tool, but there was an opportunity to do things dramatically different.
This opportunity didn’t come without a larger price tag. Justifications became more difficult since cost savings alone weren’t enough to offset the upfront costs of installing the new application. Many utilities began to recognize the benefit that GIS would offer them, but they were hard pressed to provide an economic business case to move forward on it. At the time, utilities were pushing to cut costs in their attempts to be competitive in the looming discussions of deregulation that were on the horizon. Those that had champions, with the vision to see the long-term benefits of GIS, moved forward with their plans even if they couldn’t cost justify it in the conventional method. Even today, many projects are approved using the cost savings approach or are pushed because an executive wants it to happen. For those of you that may be skeptical, even today, many utilities are lamenting the fact that they can’t move forward on automated meter reading (AMR) because they can’t find the cost savings to justify it.
They compare the millions of dollars for infrastructure installation and the cost of changing out old meters with the current cost of about 60-70 cents to read a meter manually.
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