Landbase Maintenance What the future holds
Recognizing a lucrative market, many private companies have entered into the GIS
data market. Concurrent with the data market, software companies have proliferated. In
today's market there are several companies competing for the attention of the utilities
industry, all claiming to have the most powerful, useful software products available.
The "bleeding edge" software implementation is the relational database. Proven
technologies for object-oriented data storage, retrieval and editing are moving to the
RDBMS.
Hardware development has made computing power available that can manage data
in ways few people predicted 5 years ago. Some Examples
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Near real-time updates of nationwide service territories. Multiple sources can
create "multiple simultaneous realities"
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Real World modeling is possible with remote sensing. Georeferenced
orthophotographic data is reliable and affordable.
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Communication technology is getting better, too. Wireless protocols will make
near real-time field data accessible.
Deregulation in the electric power industry, as it has in the telecommunications
industry, will create a business environment in which companies will need to be very
focused on the competitive edge. Who's buying product? What's commercial? What's
residential? Can we locate the customers we want? Can we provide the award-winning
customer service that we need to keep our customers loyal in the face of growing
competitive pressure?
The answer to all these questions can be found in the landbase, if it's current,
accurate, and detailed.
The job of collecting, compiling and updating data for an area the size of Texas or
California (not to mention the Unites States or the Western Hemisphere) is huge. There
are efficiencies of scale to be gained by forming partnerships in data sharing. These
efficiencies will only be realized when a company is willing to make a major investment
in technology and resources specifically dedicated to the care and feeding of a high
quality landbase.
From a financial perspective, most utilities will not want to sidetrack resources to do
the kind of proactive landbase maintenance required for information in today's
marketplace. In a typical month my own company, GDT, makes millions of edits across
the four nations that we maintain. These edits are made based on inputs from thousands
of sources. The staffs collecting information and making edits number in the hundreds.
No utility will be willing to make the investment required to do this and still remain
profitable.
In today's rapidly changing world, the idea that we can spend $15 - 20 per mile to
create a landbase, and that when it is "done", we can use it without a planned
maintenance effort that proactively searches for changes & new features, is just not
functional.
By partnering with a landbase data specialist, the per-mile cost can be reduced by a
factor of 10. In addition to cost-savings is the access to local knowledge that would be
unknown to the typical single-source utility landbase developer.
None of us has a crystal ball for predicting the future. Based on our analysis of
present conditions in the GIS data market, it's a sure thing that partnering with a data
compilation specialist is the way to a winning landbase strategy.
