I thought a good place to start my journey was to talk about maps. Maps are the predecessor of today’s GIS and give us an opportunity to reflect on the then and now.
In the early 90s most utility companies were still inking their facilities and specialty maps on cloth and velum sheets. Once updated maps were sent to the copy room, mass produced and distributed to all the engineering & planning departments, operations groups, field crews, and contractors. Depending on the utility, electric or gas, the number of map types would vary. For example the utility I worked for had 4 main map types; underground, overhead, area, and operating or one-line maps. Utilities maintained so many map types to support the different ways they needed to visualize the electric or gas network. This need was driven by the assigned work or task.
Maintaining these maps was a very manual and resource intense process that took large drafting groups to keep the updates rolling out the door. It wasn’t just about transposing work order redlines to a map there was also a quality control component. As a drafter you needed to understand the network and the incoming work order and when things didn’t make sense an investigation needed to take place. This included communicating and collaborating with the likes of Planners, Engineers, work planners, clerical, dispatchers, and crew leaders as well as go to the field yourself to ensure data quality. This didn’t happen overnight and could have taken weeks to get the answers. Add the time it took to actually get the work order into consideration and the backlog is months. This was the norm.
I tried to remember how many paper maps we generated a year just to support the main map type updates but it has been a while. If I had to take a SWAG I would say the average utility probably distributed somewhere around 100,000 maps per year depending on their size.
Let’s shift gears and talk about how maps were also used. The largest use of maps was for inspections. Maps were mass produced by the drafting department and sent to the inspectors which used them to coordinate and document (markups) the inspections. The marked up maps usually never went back to drafting for processing because inspection data was maintained either by filing the marked up map or someone entering the data into a mainframe or custom solution. Think about that for a moment. I’m sure in some utilities if the inspector found something that was relevant to maintaining the maps they would walk it over to drafting but I don’t think that was the case in most utilities. That also means data about the network was maintained in different systems. The other large workflow that consumed lots of maps was event support. The most common events included gas and electric outages. When these events occurred maps were used to analyze, mobilize, and communicate the situation. I never experienced or heard of a utility responding to an event without maps at the center of the strategy. I think it is fair to say support for inspections and events tripled the number of paper maps produced per year, which is significant.
Maps weren’t just created in the drafting department but all over the company. Because 85% – 90% of all data in a utility is spatial maps were used a lot by everyone. Legal, Real Estate, Environmental, and Customer Service are a couple departments that used maps to analyze, document, and communicate their business.
So why the history lesson on utility maps? Because this is the way utilities did business prior to spending tens of millions of dollars to convert data from paper maps to relational geospatial information systems. Many reasons drove utilities to spend that money (e.g. outage management, gas modeling, workforce reductions) but how did the investment change how you do business today.
- Do you still generate paper maps?
- Do you still maintain multiple sources of network map data?
- Do your map/data consumers wonder if they have the current data?
- Is there a disconnect between the field and office?
- Are inspections still using paper maps, homegrown or non-integrated systems?
- Do you print maps to respond to events?
If you answered yes to any of these I’m interested in your feedback. What is holding you back from leveraging your GIS system to enable the organization?
Spatially Aware 