How they do overseas? -
An overview of some GIT Projects in Brazil
Roberto Falco
Sisgraph LTDA
Rua Estados Unidos, 112
Sao Paulo, Brazil – 01427-000
Abstract
Besides the globalization, that has the side effect to standardize techniques and
procedures around the world, each national Utilities industry still has their particular
requirements, caused mainly by the local regulatory environment, highly influenced by
country requirements and/or regional business drivers. This paper will analyze this
environment for Brazil, and describe some key differences in comparison with the US,
that greatly impact GIT application development, and in some extent also core product
development. This analysis will be developed using as example some projects that were
implemented, or are undergoing, in Brazil.
Introduction
As a GIT professional involved in selling and implementing solutions for Brazilian
utilities based on industry-leading GIS packages, the author have been faced in the last
six years with the challenge to adapt product literature, marketing material and even data
model templates originally developed for the US market to the local market.
A set of key differences was identified during this period of time, in the areas of
application functionality, data modeling, GIT core product characteristics, and interfaces
requirements. Most of these differences can be connected to a same root, the historical
drivers behind a regulatory environment evolution, which had opposite directions in both
regions.
This paper is a summary of the author’s experience in this area, and will try to trace how
the regulatory commandments drove the evolution of GIT for certain application areas in
the US market, and compare with the opposite path that occurred in Brazil. This will be
used to explain why there are in Brazil more tight requirements for applications like
Outage Management and Long Term Planning, for example, when in the other hand
Work Management is almost an unknown application for the IT staffs of most Brazilian
utilities.
Regulatory Environment Comparisonbn
US Case
Since the early start of the Utilities industry in all countries there were a strong
intervention of the government authority, in the form of a investor, owning companies, or
as a regulatory entity (Krause, 1995). In the US, this intervention was developed over a
strong legal apparatus put in place to support the FERC activity.
In the 80’s, when the GIT industry was getting it’s first major grow, the FERC main
responsible was in the area of economic regulation, setting energy rates between the
various industry players and to the final electricity consumer.
That rate regulation applied there was based on cost-of-service criteria. This criteria has
the objective to keep the lowest consumer rate as possible, while guarantying the Return-
Of-Investment (ROI) in an agreed level with the capitalist investor (Krause, 1995;
Capeletto, 2001).
