Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software has been around for many years. The trouble is, most of that time GIS technology (and consequently its benefits) has been treated as a niche tool that applies to a specific set of problems and can be managed only by specialists. However, recent advancements in ease-of-use and deployment, greatly expanded capabilities, and integration technology have resulted in a fundamental shift in GIS and benefits to an organization. Given this maturation, it’s time for spatial data management to take its rightful place in an organization — right alongside other “mainstream” operational systems. Organizations that realize this and add more standardized support for GIS will be able to reap the full potential of its benefits in the form of more efficient operations, better customer service, and ultimately, more profitability.

Changing people’s perceptions of GIS will not be an easy task. GIS grew up isolated in the back rooms of utilities and government organizations. Though GIS has always been dependent on computer technology, it was not generally managed as part of an organization’s mainstream Information Technology (IT) system. Instead, GIS was run on proprietary hardware with complex operating systems and managed by specialists who were the only ones who understood how it worked. The software required specialized training and the output was large, cumbersome maps rather than easily read tabular reports. It was clearly different than the standard systems that IT departments were accustomed to so the IT group left the specialists alone. Everybody was content to work on their partitioned piece of the IT pie, which placed significant limits on the benefits of GIS.

The historical perception of GIS in utilities is reflected in current organizational charts. While most of the organization chart reflects the various business functions, you can still find titles such as “Director of GIS” or “GIS Specialist”. Why do we continue to treat GIS as if it is its own separate business area? We need to stop thinking of GIS as unique and isolated. It is simply an additional dimension to data that can greatly expand the way that information can be analyzed, reported and used. Where something is located is just one more piece of information about it, to be stored along with what size it is, its maintenance history, what company manufactured it and, if you want, what color it is. The utility’s business systems need to think of and incorporate location the same way they do other data. They will do this by integrating GIS technology into the mainstream business operations of the company.

So just where is GIS today? The simple answer that GIS has come a long way from its humble and secluded beginnings. Instead of just producing maps, GIS can now be used in a variety of ways to improve the efficiency of business operations and processes. Now utilities can create interfaces to pass data back and forth to these enterprise systems so that any employee, including the sales, customer service, marketing, and more, can realize the benefits of spatial data. An example of this is an electric utility tracking how the power flows through their facilities to their customers and when and where a problem occurs.

Consider a power outage to a neighborhood. When the outage is reported, modern GIS technology can pinpoint the problem in minutes or hours as opposed to days or weeks and identify what may have been affected “downstream.” A customer service representative will know quickly what the problem is and be able to tell the customer approximately how long it will take to fix. Meanwhile, crews can go immediately to the scene with the proper repair equipment and make repairs in a fraction of the time it historically has taken. This example is a far cry from early GIS days where in that same scenario, engineers would have to hunt for paper-based maps (that were relatively unreliable) and at best, provide an educated guess as to what went wrong. From there it was a lot of trial and error (and time) to see what it would take to repair.

Another example is when a utility discovers that a certain type of pole treatment does not work well, they can use GIS to quickly locate all the instances of poles that were given that treatment so they can be efficiently replaced or re-treated before they compromise service to customers. Likewise, GIS can show the utility worker the most efficient route to take for inspections or service calls, and the route can be immediately updated if he or she is forced to make an unscheduled stop. Clearly, GIS has evolved beyond just map making. It can now become an integral part of a utility’s mainstream daily operations.

Imagine a Work Management System that can not only produce a list of all transformers that are due to be inspected, but can also produce a map showing where they are and a description of the most efficient route to reach all of them. Or imagine a Customer Information System that showed the customer service representative an onscreen map displaying the customer’s business or residence along with the location of service crews, polygons representing known outages and clickable symbols with information such as that customer’s outage history. The result? Stellar customer service. There are few questions that customer is likely to have about his or her account that the customer service representative would not be able to answer directly in real time.

In addition to added functionality, integrated GIS may be easier and less costly to support. There is no longer any reason that GIS technology should require proprietary hardware or software platforms necessitating special skills to maintain. GIS, as part of the mainstream, would work with standard operating systems, databases, and application programming interfaces.

Many utilities have started to incorporate some of this critical location information into their operational systems and have started to see some of these benefits. In fact, at Autodesk, our experience has been that an electric utility serving one million meters can expect a savings of around $3-5 million annually. However, as a whole, too often spatial functionality is still the sole domain of the GIS, with data having to be extracted from one system, passed to the GIS for spatial analysis and then displayed to the end user. We will not see the full advantages of spatial data until GIS ceases to be thought of as a standalone system and becomes simply another component of data and another skill for the IT professional.