Who would have believed you if you’d claimed to see a world where major banks would go out of business because they had run out of money! That is because there was always an unshakeable confidence in the banks’ systems, people and processes. Recent banking history has proved that such confidence can be misplaced and that we should all look to answer some fundamental questions, such as: who actually owns the money; where is it right now; who has it; what are they doing with it and am I happy with what they are using it for?
The similarities between the banking industry and the utilities have always been recognised. Indeed, investing in utilities is often described as putting money in the bank! Dull and boring they may be to the risk-taking stock market, but it is a fact that utilities have an unquestionable track record when it comes to prudent capital investment in tangible assets and for providing essential services to a never-ending market. Yet, no matter how enduring the utilities appear to be on the surface, they still depend on the basic fundamentals. Where money is described as the lubricant of the economic system, asset data is the lifeblood of the utilities.
Utilities have thousands of people trying to access and manage asset data, day-in day-out, just so that they can carry out their job or task in hand. To an industry outsider it may come as a surprise to learn that despite the scale of the utilities’ operations and the huge volume of data transactions, there are teams of people extracting and returning asset data back and forth to field staff and contractors on pieces of paper. We may live in a Space Age world but utilities’ data management processes are still very much in the Stone Age!
The more enlightened utilities are introducing their staff to mobile mapping where the field operator can view, create, amend and delete asset data as part of carrying out their job. For those utilities, it has given confidence that they are improving their asset data management and removing the barriers to becoming more effective at the same time. So much so that using a map-based workflow now defines their culture.
It is important to us all that utilities remain mindful of what makes them tick and that they treat their asset data in a way that keeps their business healthy. Mobilising their field staff with maps is part of this process. It is a big task, but if the banking industry can be nationalised in a weekend imagine what utilities could achieve in a week!