Migrating Legacy GIS; an Evolutionary Approach
Observations
The latest and Greatest
Competition and opportunity drive the GIS industry to continuously improve and upgrade
their approach to GIS solutions. This is a good thing overall and it’s ultimately what sets the
various vendors apart from their competition. Some of these approaches are possibly better
than others but any mainstream approach is by and large capable of being molded to meet the
majority of requirements. This leads to the first fundamental tenet of the evolutionary
process and this is ‘it’s a mixed bag at best’ which means that no one vendor is likely to have
the perfect solution. In other words, there’s a good possibility that a multi-vendor solution is
in your future.
Another tenet of the evolution process to keep in mind ‘is that bigger is not always better’
and its corollary ‘sometimes it’s just impossible’. It’s been our experience that as the size of
the evolved application grows, the capability of the solutions are exponentially more
complex and difficult to implement. Unless you are prepared for this you could find yourself
further out on a limb when you have to deal with hardware/software performance,
standardized products, capability limits and the elapsed time to implement. This in turn eats
into your Return-On-Investment to point that it becomes pointless. So the advice is to take
significant but small steps toward your objectives. Our experience suggests that the industry
as a whole is getting better and is more apt to have answers today then 5 years ago but
unfortunately a few of us are still dealing with the systems that were installed 5 or more years
ago.
Finally, the GIS industry is driven toward newer technology and there is a dynamic between
new technology sales and supporting the old worn out stuff you bought years ago. Did I say
that in our case that it took us this long to get it to work? Conversely, what’s new in GIS
falls into the category of process improvement, which apparently some feel has a lifecycle of
two years. Do the math. With evolving systems taking more than 5 years to fully implement
this could mean that you would be somewhere in your third process improvement cycle
before you had finished implementing your first. Obviously there is something more
fundamental to this than simply implementing GIS software. We’ve discovered that the
fundamentals lie in process control and data management. No matter what your GIS
software supports, if you can continue to perform these two operations within acceptable
tolerances you will be prepared for the next wave or at least limit your risk and/or minimize
your recovery time.
Legacy Musings
It happens to everyone. Sooner or later the weird package you bought (think of Synercom or
Genamap) and the doubly weird stuff you did to it to make it work is just not getting the job
done anymore. So what to do? How do you mold whatever you did before into whatever
you’re bound to do in the future? The answer is it depends and that answer is dependent on
whether you believed any of the hyperbole that was alluded to earlier or if you really do
intend to address the fundamental elements of GIS evolution.
The caution here is to keep in mind that (write this down) ‘it’s the data stupid’. It’s also the
process that delivers that data to you and you need to control both. If you concentrate on the
data and manage the workflow to maintain the data integrity you simply cannot go wrong. In
other words, whatever is left over after all is said and done is not the GIS software, its’ the
data and the infrastructure that supports the data. It’s the way your crews process the work
reports they complete, the crew chiefs willingness to report process changes up and down the
line, the trouble crew’s attitude about moving something as insignificant as a secondary split
and the process of reporting the change. It’s all the plant accounting, auditors and recording
specialists all along the way and how concerned about the value and worth of their part of the
process. The data, when you thoughtfully consider its importance, needs to be alive in these
environments and it must be cultivated and nurtured to keep it healthy under the worst of
conditions.
We Energies has begun a course that we expect will evolve to successful GIS solutions.
Although we realize a need for new technological solutions we are consciously looking to
simpler solutions that we can test and evolve within our enterprise suite of technology and
integrated process. At the same time we are looking to see how robust and extensible these
new platforms are and how they can be extended to do more productive things in ways that
were not imagined possible just a few years ago.
