Table of Contents
President's Message: New Times, New Ideas
Education Event Demonstrates How GIS is a Key Enabler for Business Intelligence
PowerStream Finds Geospatial Solution to Manage Cable Replacement Program
CSA Developing New Standard to Ensure Accurate Maps of Underground Infrastructure
President's Message: New Times, New Ideas
By Mike MacLean
Land Information Services Manager, City of Peterborough
We are infrastructure! Just as GITA International has redefined its mission to help members apply geospatial solutions to address growing infrastructure needs, GITA Ontario is refocusing its programs and services for members like you.
As the President of GITA Ontario for 2009-10, I'm pleased to report that the Chapter Board is coming up with new ideas to fit the times.
Everyone is looking for value these days. So here's a value proposition you can't beat - free educational events! We have made a policy decision that GITA members will be able to register free for all educational events, including our Fall Forum.
We instituted the policy just in time for our event entitled "Taking the Geospatial Mystery out of Business Intelligence," on February 25 at the offices of PowerStream in Vaughan. This was an example of how our events provide information to geospatial professionals that you can't find anywhere else, as demonstrated in the reports in this newsletter.
We are already making plans for the 2009 Fall Forum, which will take place November 4 at the Oakville Conference Centre. For networking and information exchange among geospatial professionals from many disciplines, nothing beats an intensive, day-long event like the Fall Forum - and it's free to our members, along with many other membership benefits.
More free educational events are in planning stages. We will hold one in June entitled "Taking the Geospatial Mystery out of Municipal Government." In early July, we will join forces with URISA to present another session in conjunction with a golf tournament. We'll give you more details soon about those events.
Benefits Through the Web
If you own, operate, maintain or protect infrastructure, membership in GITA will connect you to people and information worldwide to help find geospatial solutions to your infrastructure needs. Membership in GITA gives you access to a searchable directory of members in 23 chapters around the world and you can reach them through GEOXchange, GITA's e-mail listserver.
The association provides international conferences and symposiums, daily geospatial news, industry publications and reports, the Geospatial Technology Report and hundreds of technical papers. All of this and more is available by joining GITA at www.gita.org/membership.
And now the Ontario Chapter has its own improved Web site! Have a look at http://gitaontario.org. The site has been designed as a blog to help increase communication among GITA members, non-members and the GITA Ontario Chapter Board.
Bookmark the page and stay up to date with geospatial news, technical developments and other blogs of interest in the Ontario geospatial community. At a time of tremendous change and development in the infrastructure that provides fundamental support to our way of life, maintaining a professional network through GITA is more valuable than ever.
MMacLean@peterborough.ca
Education Event Demonstrates How GIS
Is a Key Enabler for Business Intelligence
Geospatial technologies have become essential to compiling business intelligence that helps organizations make better decisions, the latest GITA Ontario educational event showed.
"Geographic information systems help organizations implement business intelligence better and faster, with knowledge spread among all employees," consultant Greg Duffy explained to delegates attending the event entitled "Taking the Geospatial Mystery out of Business Intelligence," on February 25 at the offices of PowerStream Inc. in Vaughan.
The term "business intelligence" refers to concepts and methods to improve business decision-making by using fact-based support systems. The GITA event presented a unique set of perspectives on the key role that geospatial technologies can have in enabling business intelligence.
Speakers gave some practical examples and discussed some of the technologies and standards behind the growing geospatial influence on business decisions. (Please see separate articles on presentations by PowerStream and the Canadian Standards Association.)
A talk by DMTI Spatial Inc. demonstrated the ability of geospatial technologies to unify data within an organization and eliminate the silos that impede or block corporate knowledge. Boris Gutkin, director of product management, enterprise solutions for DMTI, and account manager Billy Ormerod discussed the company's data-governance solution, which has been implemented at several large utilities and telecommunications companies. It is based on a methodology and technology collectively called master address management.
"This is a technology to support business intelligence," Ormerod explained. "A lot of companies think business intelligence is the answer to all their problems but if your data is not governed at the smallest level of geography, which is an address, your decisions could be made on the basis of disparate and inaccurate reports."
DMTI software consolidates all the corporate address data from billing, engineering and other systems and creates an index for each unique location, which serves as a universal identifier regardless of how the address appears in different data silos. This index can be enriched with attributes to enable the organization to analyze its services and performance in relation to each customer.
Gutkin said, "Through the address we can manage parcels, we can manage buildings, and provide all kinds of information that is significant in making decisions."
Duffy's presentation showed why geospatial technologies can bring even larger benefits when channelled through business intelligence.
Business intelligence and geomatics are about the same things - gathering and analyzing information to make decisions, posited Duffy, who is the principal consultant of Woodfield Consulting.
"If you adopt GIS in your organization, you have in fact already invested heavily in subsequent downstream applications such as business intelligence," he said. "GIS helps organizations implement business intelligence better, faster, cheaper, sooner."
That investment can have an impact beyond what management expects. It can spread business intelligence not just to executives, but throughout the organization.
"GIS transforms organizations; it's not just information," Duffy asserted. "It equips employees to be more confident because they have access to information to make decisions -- and they actually do make decisions based on this data.
"The organization no longer has such a vertical structure. Employees can make decisions on their own, at the moment when a decision is needed, with this new intelligence. And the president and other senior executives become more directional."
For many large organizations, however, such a transformation has to overcome legacy barriers, as Laverne Hanley's presentation showed.
Hanley is manager of mapping services for Union Gas Limited, which needs to manage about $5.5 billion in assets. Essentially all of them - including 141,000 gas pipeline valves spread over 400 communities - are mapped by the company's GeoMedia system. It is effectively the corporate system of record for assets.
But that system has become overloaded with too many tasks over the years, Hanley said. The work-management program for pipeline inspections, for example, is embedded within it. Union Gas has realized that GIS systems were not intended for such purposes and is reorganizing to "decouple the inventory from the history."
It has a Facility Information System (FIS) strategy to accomplish that reorganization in a first phase, followed by later phases to integrate a number of other systems that do not talk to each other.
"What we need to do is move through this phase to the point where we can make true business intelligence decisions, to be more safe, reliable, compliant and efficient," Hanley said. "We see geospatial technology as being the key enabler in our FIS strategy and in our asset-management strategy."
PowerStream Finds Geospatial Solution
To Manage Cable Replacement Program
When your infrastructure includes many thousands of pieces of equipment and thousands of kilometres of cable that connect them, all subject to natural decay, how do you decide which ones to replace or upgrade at a sustainable pace?
That is a fundamental management issue at PowerStream Inc. Decisions have to be made with the best possible business intelligence. That's why the company relies on geospatial technologies and techniques to support its decision-making models.
Kris Philpott, manager of GIS Development at Powerstream, the second-largest municipally owned electrical distribution company in Ontario, told the audience at GITA Ontario's Feb. 25 educational event how the company has spatially enabled its business intelligence, specifically for its asset-replacement program.
PowerStream sets priorities for replacing its cables, transformers and other assets by using a mathematical model it calls ACA, for asset condition assessment. Spatial data fed into this model is enabling the company to build a 10-year plan for replacing the cable installed in 11 municipalities throughout Simcoe and York regions.
That's a more effective and reliable way to manage the replacement cycle than the previous method, Philpott remarked.
"In the good old days we could go to Steve the lineman, who knows everything about every asset in the field, and say, 'Tell us which cables are the oldest and which ones have the most faults.' And he would rhyme them off.
"That doesn't cut it any more. Those guys will all be retiring soon."
PowerStream still consults its field teams for advice on scheduling replacements but relies more on its ACA model. Its results are displayed through the company's ESRI technology as polygons, colour coded by certain ranges in the ACA benefit-cost ratio to indicate which areas have highest priority for cable replacement.
Building this capability was not easy because PowerStream initially lacked the historic data showing precisely when its cable assets were installed, Philpott explained. It found the answer by the ingenious method of turning work-order data into maps.
PowerStream's work-order data is tied to its GIS system so that each work order is given spatial representation as a polygon. The dates and descriptions of the work orders can be applied to any assets within the polygons.
"Having that spatial index of our historic work orders means we have spatially enabled our business intelligence to make more informed decisions about project selection," Philpott said.
"We can now forecast our replacement needs for 10 years. And we plan to build ACA models for all of our asset classes."
CSA Developing New Standard to Ensure
Accurate Maps of Underground Infrastructure
Geospatial technologies support business intelligence by enabling corporate-wide access to reliable data. But what if the data itself is questionable?
That is a problem, especially when applied to underground infrastructure. What's needed is a framework for publishing, cataloguing, accessing and exchanging accurate utility-related records.
The Canadian Standards Association is attempting to do that by implementing a new standard, S250, for the mapping of underground infrastructure. The chair of the technical committee for this project, Bob Gaspirc, described its importance in a presentation to GITA Ontario's educational event, "Taking the Geospatial Mystery out of Business Intelligence," on February 25 in Vaughan.
"If utility owners and operators across Canada apply this CSA standard to their operations, will it improve the reliability of their records to support business intelligence?" asked Gaspirc, who is manager of mapping services for the City of Toronto.
"The technical committee of the CSA S250 Mapping of Underground Infrastructure standard believes that accurate, complete and dependable records will make for improved decision making."
Municipalities have complained records provided by utilities with out-of-date and inconsistent data. Municipalities themselves have differing requirements governing data about underground infrastructure. There are high costs associated with today's multiple standards.
CSA S250, scheduled for release in the summer of 2010, is intended to ensure that the reporting of underground infrastructure will be sound enough to give assurance to the public that the data can reasonably be relied on.
The standard will require that data on underground installations has to be collected at or near the time the event occurred. It will have to be collected by a person competent to do so and who is authorized to compile reports as legal evidence.
"Standards support the business intelligence world," Gaspirc said in urging his audience to understand and support CSA S250.
| |