Back in July this year I posted a piece on Smart Grids and how the "DNO's needed to get their strategic hats on and to start delivering if they are to have any hope of surviving in this brave new world". Now GIS giant ESRI has commissioned a survey "Is your GIS Smart Grid Ready" http://www.esri.com/software/landing_pages/smart-grid/docs/smartgridreport.pdf
It also reported some of the results in April's Edition of the GIS Professional magazine. http://www.esri.com/library/articles/smart-grid.pdf
Out of 226 participants, ESRI reported that "The results are perhaps not too surprising – most ranked ‘smart grid readiness’ as strategic to their plans,though none has achieved readiness in all areas." Summarising some of the findings:
- Only 10% of the companies update GIS data within 1 day of work completion.
- About 25% indicate that they have work orders older than 6 months still to be added to the GIS database.
- Over 30% of respondents take 31-90 days to update their GIS to reflect the completion of construction/maintenance.
- Over 60% reported integration as being "data both extracted and imported between GIS and other systems"
- Only 5% use a SOA/Web Services approach to GIS
- Only 70% have a complete model of their network.
If this is a true and accurate reflection on the Utilities' GIS data and their supporting business processes, it can only be imagined what state the rest of their data and processes are in.
On this evidence Utilities data and supporting data management processes are in a complete mess - but I guess that anyone close to the Utilities knows that already?