Getting into GIS

One of the fastest growing industries in the US at the moment is geospatial technology, with the market expected to reach more than $21 billion in revenue over the next few years. GIS means big business.

The utility industry is one sector that has been driving this growth and utilizing technologies to help improve particular aspects of their business activities. Not so long ago, GIS was being used by utilities to simply produce operating maps. Nowadays, the extent of the technology’s range has been recognized and GIS is being used for a range of operations from work management and maintenance, to marketing and customer profiling. “Utilities now see GIS as a strategic system or platform for doing business,” explains Jones. “They use it for the planning, design, operation, maintenance and marketing of their organization.”

With improving efficiency a major target for the utility industry, it is unsurprising that many organizations have turned to GIS to help improve in this area. According to Jones, geospatial technologies have become an essential tool for the utility industry and have numerous uses for the sector. “All utilities are looking for ways to improve efficiency,” he says. “Projects to improve efficiency need to show returns on investment that fit in with the corporate business requirements. This ROI is often described with measurements of key performance indicators, and GIS provides a technology for providing operational efficiencies and the capabilities to measure those efficiencies. Nearly every utility process involves location, from finding where streetlights are out to locating gas leaks to siting wind farms. So GIS is really a platform for better utility information.”

Areas in which GIS is used include asset management where is can be used to locate assets, determine their condition and make repair and replacement decisions about a given asset. Another area in which is it deployed is work management. “For example, utility companies use GIS to schedule work, dispatch crews and route materials to a job site,” continues Jones. “Taken a step further, GIS can also drive a mobile work management system, by dispatching work crews from a remote location to do an inspection, or respond to something like a power outage or gas line leak. One thing to remember is that, while GIS is a great tool for responding to emergency and disaster situations, it’s used on a daily basis by utilities for scheduling routine maintenance, such as vegetation management, tree trimming cycles and street light maintenance.”

A further use of GIS by utilities is for load forecasting. Says Jones: “Utility companies use GIS to analyze demographics, population densities and existing data in their customer information systems (CIS) to predict where they will need to expand their assets or where they may have spare assets. So, as you can see, the utility industry uses GIS for the planning, design, operation and maintenance of their entire utility.”

Another reason for a company to implement a GIS solution is to manage the fallout from deregulation that has effectively transformed the energy industry. In this case, GIS can help close performance gaps, such as customer satisfaction, earnings, reliability and safety information. “By being able to analyze the data taken from this information and then comparing it to the best practice, it helps the utility run better,” says Jones. “GIS is also the tool of choice for marketing, because again, it can take retail customer data and be broken down and analyzed to determine trends and to model customer behaviors. GIS is a very effective marketing tool for anyone selling and delivering a service or product.”

Getting it right first time

According to Jones, implementing a GIS system properly first time is essential for any utility company, as customers can be demanding and will not tolerate hitches in the services they receive. “From the outset, there needs to be good upfront planning and expectations of what the GIS system can deliver need to be set,” he advises. “It should also be considered that part of deploying a GIS is devoting significant time for employee training and change management.”

Two pieces of advice that Jones would like to convey is for organizations to avoid the urge to make their GIS systems fit every unique aspect of the way they do business, and also to avoid scope creep. “By this I mean jumping into a phase of the implementation process too soon or without proper planning,” he says. “It’s important to properly manage new functionality, set targets and milestones ahead of time and add new changes in well managed phases. When a big change such as implementing a GIS system occurs, it’s easy to lose focus, especially if the different phases of the project are not well defined from the start or if they are rushed.”

Of the numerous new technologies making an impact in the utility sector, Jones believes many have their roots in GIS. “They are either accessing data maintained in GIS, or using core spatial tools made available on GIS platforms,” he explains. “For example, connecting a GIS to CIS can deliver load information to assist with design, but CIS can also deliver data to GIS to provide outage analysis and help the GIS system predict the failed device. Using GIS as the data management platform, utilities are able to use sound IT practices for database management such as replication and standard security, while making data available throughout the enterprise via services oriented architectures.”

New technologies will continue to have significant impacts on utilities’ operations, says Jones, although access to spatial data in a database will “nearly always be at the hub of the operation”, as seen with the large uptake of mobile, dispatch and work management applications.

Rising demand

As global demand for energy is set to increase threefold over the next few decades, Jones expects the technology to develop to deal with this growth. “GIS is designed to help planners assess an enormous number of spatial factors for optimal power supply siting,” he explains. “They use it to site new generation sites including large nuclear plants, wind, solar and geothermal power sources. For a utility, GIS is an essential tool to optimize the delivery of power no matter how small or how big the delivery system and service territory. Efficiently determining where power needs to go is one way GIS will help deal with the growth.”

Anther way GIS will help with this growth is by determining how power is going to get where it needs to go. "Expanding new routes for gas and electric transmission will continue to be a challenging process, but for those utilities using GIS, they’re ahead of the curve,” predicts Jones. “Its GIS that helped determine that the demand for energy will increase by three times over the next few decades and it will be GIS that helps utilities meet those demands. That’s how GIS works.”

BIO:
Brent Jones is President of the Geospatial Information and Technology Association (GITA) for 2007. His longstanding participation with GITA includes activities at the local, national and international level, and is past Chairman of the GIS for Oil and Gas Conference.

Brent is also the Survey and Engineering Industry Manager for ESRI. His background includes surveying and engineering operations as well as mapping, photogrammetry and AM/FM/GIS services. He is the Manager of Worldwide Surveying and Engineering Solutions for ESRI where his specific responsibilities include strategic industry planning, business development and marketing activities.

As a registered professional engineer and licensed land surveyor, Brent’s technical background includes land surveying, utility design, construction management, GIS design and implementation, regulatory permitting and compliance.