Spaced out

Geospatial information management is fast becoming an integral part of many organizations’ IT infrastructures. Dave Sonnen, IDC’s Senior Consultant for Spatial Information Management, discusses the potential for spatial technologies in the utility industry – including the development of tools, the associated benefits and how SIM is no longer a specialized application.

BM. What is spatial information management and why is it important in utilities or energy?
DS. Spatial information management, or just SIM, is a term we coined at IDC in 1992 to describe the broad use of spatial technology within information systems. We needed a way to categorize the many technologies that deal with the concept of the location of things. SIM includes technologies like GIS, GPS, spatial databases and imagery.

The SIM space is changing from being a set of specialized, standalone technologies to part of the overall IT infrastructure. Instead of being driven by specific geospatial requirements (for example, mapping), the evolution of this technology is driven more by enterprise IT and business process requirements. For instance, if you have a broad business process within a utility (such as facilities management), then SIM technologies are beginning to be integrated across the whole process.

We are starting to see various companies provide a much broader set of spatial utilities across their whole offerings. For example, Oracle recently bought several utility software providers (SDL, Londstar) and can now handle outage management, facilities management and meter data management. Oracle is systematically going through these technology stacks and adding their own spatial capabilities. They are building the ability to use spatial information across all their applications. Other companies that play in this space, like GE, are doing the same thing.

Innovation within the spatial information world is really booming at the moment and we’re seeing convergence among CAD, GIS and operational systems. There are a lot of really interesting new concepts – although with this comes a lot of noise. The point is that it is certainly feasible, practical and beneficial for utilities and energy companies to spread the use of spatial information across everything they do – from design, provisioning, construction, outage management to workflow management to their customer-facing applications.

BM. How can spatial information bring significant benefits to the organization?
DS. Location-specific information is a basic necessity. For utilities and energy companies, the infrastructure is geographically dispersed. They have to know where it is to be able to manage it effectively. Having a good, accurate location of all facilities (including transmission lines, distribution facilities, customers, etc) is crucial.

The benefit of making spatial information consistently available across all work processes is that you gain efficiency, you reduce costs, and you get a consistent view of where things are. The spatial information also includes connectivity, so you can trace down through switches, circuits, breakers, capacitors, transformers and all of the pieces of the infrastructure can be represented as a network. This is essential; you can’t really run a modern utility without spatial information.

Once you have a good picture of your infrastructure then utilities can see an additional benefit – process improvement. For example, I’ve talked to several utilities recently and found that once they have consistent location information the number of times they have to dispatch a work crew to a particular problem goes down significantly. They are able to reduce the revisits to a problem site by as much as 60 percent. This is an indication of the kind of efficiency you can get with accurate spatial information. Also, it is possible to respond more quickly to changes in the regulatory environment and customer requirements if you know where everything is.

BM. What are the most important questions that utilities should address before they add spatial capabilities to their information system?
DS. As they start to implement they are going to need a clear picture of what works and what’s broken. The first thing they are going to need to do is clearly define their work processes. This may seem like a strange place to start if you are looking at an information system, but you really have to start with your work processes.

The second thing to think about is what information you need and when you need it to support these processes. This information needs to be completely independent of what vendors would like to give you. It is important to define your information architecture clearly. After this point, you will have a good, clean set of requirements and you can go out to the vendors and ask who is best to do the job. You will then be in a much better position to select the right technologies. The utility needs to make sure that their vendors can clearly and simply support the use of their infrastructure information across all the business processes that have been identified.

When this works it can be pretty impressive. I was working with one utility up in the middle part of the US a few years ago and found that for facilities management they had six separate systems used to schedule crews, maintain inventory, provision new customers and manage construction. They looked across the whole of their workflow and found about 25 separate applications were being used to address parts of different processes. They managed to get down to three applications and were able to create one central location data repository. Because of this, they were able to save tens of millions of dollars annually.

BM. If an organization such as a utility wanted to implement an overall SIM solution into their enterprise technology and make it a core component of their IT infrastructure, which software categories would be necessary?
DS. The first thing is set of tools for managing the IT architecture and design – tools for managing a picture of the overall business process is a good place to start. This tends to be quite a small investment and these tools tend to be quite useful over time.

Then you have to look for some ability to acquire the spatial data. Most utilities now have been gathering digital infrastructure data for years. If they have had problems with it (or in the case of mergers and acquisitions are bringing two information systems together), then they have to look at the tools used to gather this information and then reconcile the differences.

Then you have to have the applications and these depend on what you are trying to get done – whether it is facilities management, construction scheduling, design, circuit or distribution design, the relationship between the distribution and the customers or metering. Each applications area has its own sets of vendors and packages so the utilities tend to have to do a lot of careful searching and selecting. This varies across the world. For instance, in Malaysia the distributors and software providers tend to be different to those in Canada or the US. So there are regional and geographical differences between vendors and the kinds of applications that are provided. To make sense of it all the utility will generally bring in a consultant. The role of the consultant is to ask the hard questions of the vendors but also to make sure locations are tested in order that they deliver what the utility wants. There is no simple, straight answer for this.

BM. Are there any potential environmental benefits?
DS. Yes, they are significant. The environmental benefits can occur because adequate spatial information lets you be more efficient. When you are more efficient then it is possible to sit back and evaluate alternatives. You are able to assess environmental impacts much more easily and make better decisions.

Also, a good solid picture of the spatial structure or infrastructure gives you the ability to exchange ideas with the various groups that are affected. These will include environmental groups, consumer groups or regulatory bodies, who all want to be involved in your decision process. Once you have a good, clear, reliable picture, all will have a common discussion point, the level of trust will be higher and the ability to make better decisions is going to be improved. It’s not simply a matter of implementing a technology; it’s a matter of doing a good job of design and implementation and having the right people in the right spot. It’s easy for us to assign the benefit to the technology but really it’s a design issue and an implementation issue.

BM. How do you see SIM technology changing over the next decade?
DS. I think there are three factors that come into play here: The first is that GIS and other SIM technologies are going to become part of the overall IT infrastructure. SIM will become part of everything that we do in the utility space, whilst reliability is going to be much improved.

The second big change is going to be around the acquisition of location-specific information. There are many technologies out there right now for keeping track of where things are – things like GPS, the cell phone network, RFID, networked sensors, and so on. At the moment, these tend to be separate; they have their own market trajectories, channels and technologies. Sooner or later, however, they will all converge. Then location of anything will be measured in real-time.

The idea that you are going to have a real-time picture of your whole infrastructure operation, including where your people are, means that the state of all the fixed inventory is going to be much easier to organise. So all of this information will be fed into IT infrastructure solutions in real-time so you will get real-time results.

The third change is it’s going to be a lot cheaper. Right now many SIM technologies are a pretty expensive proposition. We are starting to see broad competition amongst the IT infrastructure providers, and the cost has come down a lot. Open Source is also driving costs down.

Overall, SIM technologies are behaving like the rest of IT. Moore’s Law rules and SIM will get a lot cheaper, better and faster.

BM. What percentage of the marketplace right now is looking into either expanding or developing SIM systems within the enterprise?
DS. The electric power, oil and gas space, water and wastewater areas have been long-time users of geospatial technologies. There are very few that don’t have some ability to deal with digital spatial information. Rather than somebody starting from scratch, what we are seeing is people starting to implement more integrated solutions. They are starting to bring their solutions together, trying to get away from stovepiped solutions and the traditional approach to these broad enterprise systems. Most of the utilities that I know of are all heading in this direction. It’s a very high percentage, probably about 60, 70 or even 80 percent.

BM. Are there any other important topics that we have not addressed?
DS. The upfront design work is extremely important, as is understanding the work processes. Right now, the user of the utility is going to be faced with pulling together technology from different places, but as they do this they need a clear picture of their own business requirements, their own information requirements and information architecture. If they don’t have that in place first, then they are going to continue to have problems with stovepiped systems, with incompatibilities between data and incompatibilities between applications.

These incompatibilities tend to be where information systems break down. Focusing information design, governance, information architectures and update processes is key. Unfortunately for most organizations, this is politically and culturally difficult to do, but if you are going to have a successful spatial system then it is really important.

The key is to identify this business requirements definition and planning phase as essential. It is a core competency for the utility and they need to treat it as such. They will get really good marginal returns in lots of ways if they do this. The downside of this is that most organizations, utilities or otherwise, are divided into functional areas or cultural groups that have difficulty in crossing political and cultural boundaries. The information governance process has to be effective in cutting across these boundaries. Building a clear, genuine working set of requirements needs to be an ingrained part of the culture. If you can do this then the rest of the process is going to work very well. The technology is out there and the spatial technology is widely available from different sources. But without that clear set of definitions and governance to keep the system going, it’s not going to work.