Unified Enterprise GIS Roadmap: Business Case

Executive Manager: Julia

As a leading member at her utility, Julia manages her company’s short-term and long-term goals, aligning them with her company’s strategic plan and vision. Additionally, she oversees project executions, making sure they remain on budget and are delivered on time to her clients. Oftentimes, Julia is stuck doing menial, administrative tasks due to outdated applications. She also has difficulty coordinating between departments and making timely decisions due to the delay and inaccessibility of decision support data.

With these responsibilities, Julia is constantly looking for ways to improve processes and efficiencies as well as reduce costs. Right now, she believes there are several areas that could be enhanced at her company. She is not sure of the extent of these improvements, however, since her utility’s technology has not been evaluated since she has been with the company.

Julia has a big vision for her utility, ranging from enriching her utility’s GIS, launching Smart Grid initiatives, and eventually migrating to the Utility Network. She is also interested in seeing how her utility’s GIS could be leveraged to augment other business areas downstream. Although she has big plans, she is overwhelmed by the prospect of starting. What she does know is that without a structured approach and timeline for unifying her objectives, she will not get the necessary sponsorship for her enterprise vision to become reality.

Validates Strategic Vision

With a strategic roadmap, Julia would ensure that her vision aligns with building future investments on technologies relevant to her utility that are supported by vendors and user communities. Using UDC’s Enterprise GIS Roadmap approach, Julia could demonstrate how her plan would enable her utility’s vision for enhancing customer services through better outage event and Smart Grid management, improve work management and mobile workforce capabilities, and enrich her utility’s asset management.

To ensure these visions are incorporated into her utility’s future state, Julia would recommend utility executives to meet with a UDC executive in the initial phase of the roadmap. Doing so would align Julia with her sponsors, putting her within reach of receiving the needed sponsorship for her vision.

Operational Savings

Operating a large utility, Julia’s company would save millions of dollars annually through removing or upgrading legacy applications, optimizing processes her employees use daily, and eliminating manual tasks. Improvement of her utility’s data would also drive capital equipment savings and support a modern asset management reliability-centered maintenance (RCM). Her utility would save additional money through advanced reporting and the absence of compliance fees.

Improved Decision Making

Through integrating her current operations, work management, and mobile workforce management systems with Enterprise GIS dashboarding power, Julia would receive current data and metrics, providing her with real-time decision support based on tailored dashboard widgets and thematic summary map displays. Through integrating portfolio optimization tools for CAPEX planning with her utility’s Enterprise GIS, decisions could be made at the risk-level, not just the engineering or economic level, as Julia’s utility does now.

With superior data, communications, and information sharing, Julia would be better informed to make tactical and strategic decisions regarding operations, customer service, workforce productivity, asset health, and targeted RCM.

Satisfied Stakeholders

Customers

With improved data and information sharing, dispatchers would be better-informed to make decisions in both normal and emergency situations, providing a higher level of service to utility customers. In conjunction with enhanced tracking and prioritization capabilities, Julia’s utility could address potential power quality issues proactively, by integrating her utility’s Enterprise GIS with its AMI information. With the added visualization to preventively address issues, Julia’s utility could significantly reduce the number of momentary outages – something her utility is currently incapable of doing.

Employees

Integrating new Enterprise GIS applications would assist Julia in visually planning work and monitoring the status of completed work, improving functionality overall. Additionally, integrations would reduce the number of applications to perform tasks, leading to less down-time and monotony and an increase in work efficiency.

Likewise, reducing tedious, time-consuming tasks, such as the manual generation of work status, would allow Julia to focus on her managerial duties instead of administrative tasks. With timely, accurate, and consistent data available, employee satisfaction would increase, leading to higher quality.

Dedicating time in her roadmap for change management tasks would allow Julia’s utility to effectively train its employees on the new technology and applications before the cutover. In doing so, Julia would be providing stability to her employees, resulting in boosted retention rates.

IT Director: Mike

Mike works in the IT department of a mid-sized utility company. As the director, he oversees network infrastructure and system functionality, ensuring the IT systems are secure, consistent, and reliable. Additionally, he monitors data backup and system security operations.

Right now, more than half of the IT issues he and his team are tasked with solving are caused by outdated and inefficient applications. Mike’s team receives several tickets a day from users asking for help using the applications. Since his utility’s databases are non-integrated, applications are not on one platform or synched, making it difficult to switch between them easily. Because of this, his team’s day consists of helping users navigate the systems.

By evaluating the legacy IT infrastructure, Mike believes his organization could consolidate and upgrade its technology for improved efficiencies, determine whether the current infrastructure could support future company objectives, and identify if best-industry practices are being employed.

Understand Technology Approaches

Although Mike knows that his utility’s IT infrastructure needs improvements, he is not sure which technologies would be best suited for his utility. Through the future state model workshop, Mike and his team would learn which technologies similar-sized utilities are adopting along with other industry trends. With this information, Mike could confidently choose the best solutions for his utility’s specific processes, functions, and roles.

Process Optimization

Technology-enabled process improvements, such as decommissioning existing legacy systems, upgrading outdated applications, and eliminating manual tasks, would lead to better efficiency within all levels of Mike’s organization in addition to improved data throughout. Leveraging his utility’s GIS, Mike could generate Enterprise GIS services-based web and field applications and reports, leading to higher productivity and accuracy organization-wide.

Enhanced Security

Now more than ever, utilities require elevated levels of security for protection against outside threats. Based on the findings of the current state assessment, Mike would learn which areas of his utility’s IT security need improvement. Recommendations from the findings would generate plans for protecting his utility’s data, removing duplicate data, backing-up the data and systems, and patching system programs using a regular cadence.

Also, by leveraging the GIS to enhance his utility’s outage management capabilities, Mike and his team would be aware of any grid attacks the moment they happen, through real-time monitoring. Enterprise GIS dashboards could be quickly built to overlay his utility’s IT Network Infrastructure on top of the power network, assist in restoring the IT Network and supporting the power grid restoration if both are out.

Integration Benefits

Through linking his utility’s systems and processes, Mike would reduce manual intervention, duplicate data inputs, information relays, inaccuracies, and lost paperwork – leading to higher security, safety, and productivity.

Mike could use active services-based integration patterns to integrate his operational, work management, ADMS, asset management, and customer information systems as described in UDC’s reference Enterprise GIS solution architectures. For additional benefits, Mike could integrate his utility’s operational systems with UDC’s Digital Utility® DyAN, leveraging the data marshaling power of the application to provide additional visual real-time status for emergency and planned switching, replays of automatic switch logs, tracking and management of abnormal device settings, and automatic generation of outage reporting indices.