The Challenge of going Global

The Challenge of going Global

Jacob J. Parakadan
Enterprise Wide Technical Services
Email: jjparakad@duke-energy.com

Francisco Maria Sarmento
Intergraph Public Safety
Email: fmsarmen@ingr.com

Abstract
This paper addresses issues that energy companies face when expanding operations across international borders. Emphasis will be on AM/FM/GIS implementation related issues, such as handling different government regulations, managing different projections systems, dealing with data and readouts in different measuring units (metric, English etc.), international data transfers, achieving data security, providing access to data across a global enterprise, multilingual user interface, and handling regional sensitive data

Introduction
Privatization of state-owned energy companies in many nations around the globe has had a major impact on the global energy market. Many of the US companies are investing in hundreds of million of dollars in these newly privatized energy companies abroad. Globalization is changing the energy market profoundly by providing an alternate opportunity for maximizing return on investment. Energy companies are looking at how this globalization can best be managed to produce the greatest possible benefits to the bottom dollar.

One great opportunity to enhance the return on investment through Globalization is to move the various international assets to a common AM/FM/GIS platform. AM/FM/GIS systems play a key role on enterprise wide implementations. These implementations provide graphic representation to company’s assets and integrate several distinct alphanumeric applications enabling communications between departments that may very well be in different countries. Different users can now use a single source of data, eliminating cost related to training, data redundancy and maintenance.

Handling Different Government Regulations
Energy companies around the world have been under strict government regulations in each of the countries that they operate. These regulations can vary from country to country. Some of the tasks the AM/FM/GIS system is used within an energy company are:

Performing research and analysis (Class, MAOP etc…) on the network infrastructure to make sure that it meets or exceeds the expectations of the regulating government bodies of the country in which they operate (e.g. Department of Transportation or FERC for United States; National Energy Board in Canada).
Reporting to the different government agencies on their network and infrastructure (e.g. NPMS Reporting)
Determining areas within the infrastructure that requires upgrades.

Global solutions for the global market require AM/FM/GIS systems be implemented with software that can be easily reengineered to meet all of the different rules and regulations enforced on them

Managing Datta in Different Projection Systems
One important issue faced by the AM/FM/GIS implementation team while expanding their systems globally is the handling of data in different projection systems, that is, how data is stored, displayed and reported in each area locally. Energy companies within the United States have already gone through this problem earlier when they started expanding their networks within the United States. Some have chosen to use a single projection system which can cover the entire area of operation without introducing any major distortions in distance, direction, scale and area (e.g. Albers Equal Area), while others have chosen to use multiple projections to store and display data (e.g. State Plane).

Current AM/FM/GIS applications allow the storage of the data into one projection system and the display and manipulation of that data into another projection. Therefore, the option to select a common projection system and presenting the data to the end-user on a familiar projection system seems to be the best approach to the authors. A very important consideration is performance – the conversion will have to be extremely fast to be performed on the fly, which can be a major issue when dealing with large amounts of data. Another possible solution is for the conversion to be performed upfront, so the end user connects to data that is already converted to the desired map projection.

Dealing with data and Readouts in Different Measuring Units (METRIC, ENGLISH, ETC.)
Another common problem in trying to harmonize data from different countries or regions is the measuring units such as Feet and Meters, Pounds and Grams, etc. This can be best exemplified with the unfortunate accident with the Mars Climate Orbiter in 1999 that cost NASA US$ 125M1. The problem of mismatched units applies to both data stored in the database and ad-hoc measurements. It is recommended that data stored in the database, be stored under a single measuring unit and allow the system to provide distinct readouts of the same information for the end user

In this picture, the same database column is shown twice to display the highlighted cable (in light blue) length – one in feet and the other in meters. As for the ad-hoc measurements the AM/FM/GIS system must be flexible to allow the end user to define how information will be presented.

This Options / Measurement Tab allows the end user, at any time, to define the readout measurement units. (In this example we are using feet for distances and square feet for areas.) This Options / Precision Coordinates Tab allows the user to define how coordinates will be displayed on the screen.

International Data Teansfers
Government regulations play a major role on issues involving moving data across borders. Energy companies expanding their operations in other countries face this problem when collecting data for their AM/FM/GIS systems. This type of data is collected in one location, processed in other and may be stored in a different location. Moving sensitive data across borders for processing or storage may come under intense scrutiny from foreign governments. Size does matter when talking about AM/FM/GIS data sets. The data sets can easily grow as we start adding map quadrangles, aerial photography, images, vector landbase, etc. Moving these huge data sets across borders become a significant issue when considering a global implementation.

In situations like this, moving to a common AM/FM/GIS platform that can be used by the whole enterprise is a viable solution. Once in common platform, the data can be internationalized and reengineered easily facilitating the implementation in different countries as a part of the enterprise system. This allows for the data to stay close to the end-user. This is fairly easy to accomplish when all data resides in the database, which is not the case of the large images that usually compound these datasets.

Achieveing Data Security
Security plays a major role when an energy company tries to take their data to a global audience who will not only view the data but might update it. AM/FM/GIS security can be addressed at various different levels:

User Level. This can be achieved by using the operating system security along with the application security for granting access to the system.
Data Level. As more and more business units start adding data into the enterprise AM/FM/GIS systems, the issue of defining access to their data sets arises within the enterprise. Applications need to be able to split data into separate segments within the system. This allows system administrators to segment the data based on operational or international borders.
Function Level. Data in AM/FM/GIS systems can be owned by different departments within the enterprise, and most of the times these groups don’t want users from other groups to manipulate their data. Thus having a function level security within the application will allow system administrators to define permission groups which consist of a set of functions, then define roles which will be a set of permission groups and finally assign roles to each of the users of the system. Thus giving comfort to the department heads that only specific users will be able to perform

some of the very sensitive tasks within the system.

Here is an example of how security is achieved at Duke Energy for their current Duke Energy Pipeline Facilities Management System (DEPFMS). An administrator can define function level security for all the users of the application and also each user can have a separate set of permission for each of the company data sets within the application.

Providing Access to Data Across a Globle Enterprise
Day to day operations are usually performed at a regional level and it is not necessary to share data between several regions. More complex tasks, such as Planning, Reporting, and Risk Analysis. need to be performed enterprise wide, requiring access to information that may be spread over a very large network.

A centralized database would be the easiest to maintain but, because of the issues identified in this paper, it may not be possible to implement such architecture – it may be necessary to implement multiple databases. If the information is now spread all over the network on different databases how can Planning and other departments glue it all together to perform their tasks? There are several answers to this, and the most common would be to copy all the databases into a single repository. In this case, there would be several databases that needed to be accessed. The AM/FM/GIS tool has to be able to access and integrate data from several databases seamlessly and effortlessly to the end-user. To overcome the limitations of wide area networks in terms of performance, this integration has to minimize the trips from the end-user to the different database servers. The authors recommend that the application should be able to publish the bulk load of the data into files that can be transmitted overnight from site to site. The end-user would connect to these published files and would update any changes to published files with live information from the database (no need to replicate the entire database as well) – this way, only the deltas would be transferred on the WAN, instead of transmitting all graphics and tabular information.

Multilingul User Interface
Most of the companies look at the initiative of a common AM/FM/GIS platform as a way of consolidating data and servers in a way to cut costs, but we have to deal with the challenge of offering a global solution for the global audience. One obvious issue here is how to deal with different languages.

As with what happens to the units of measuring, the systems have to be capable to adapt to each individual – and the language is a major impact on the success or failure of these implementations. To overcome the language barriers, the most common solution is to have different applications – each on a different language. This is an OK approach if business rules are all different as well, but in cases where the business rules are the same it would be a challenge to maintain multiple systems in synch and eventually accessing the same databases. AM/FM/GIS applications must be flexible to adjust the GUI according to the end-user. In being the same application, but with a different GUI (language), the application will ensure that all business rules will be the same; no matter in what language the GUI is presented. This will ensure for a better quality control over the data, minimizing the problems of different users manipulating the same data.

This picture illustrates a telecom AM/FM/GIS application – English GUI.

This is the same application as the previous picture, but the GUI is in French.

Handling Regional Senitive
Most countries are very sensitive about their detailed GIS data. They are very cautious when taking data out of the country. They always prefer to have regional data secure and to reside within their borders.

Countries like Russia are very critical about using external GPS units to capture data within the country. They would like the international companies to use their GPS units to capture the data about their infrastructure and the surrounding area. They are also very particular of not allowing this GPS data to be taken out of the country. Thus implementing an AM/FM/GIS system that can split its data into regional data sets and provide a high level of security on the data will help resolve this problem.

Summary
Globalization mandates that IT departments and companies which provide solutions to energy companies in the AM/FM/GIS field must have their software designed and developed as to facilitate the ability to internationalize and reengineered with minimal effort.