Challenges Utilities are Facing Including Reducing Risk

The recent announcement Grant County Public Utility District Selects Autodesk Utility Software reminded me of an important question utilities face when planning to address some of the the most common challenges utilities are facing.

1. Improving Design Productivity

Design productivity has become critical as a result of the aging and shrinking workforce which means that organizations need to do more with less.  Organizations are losing experienced designers to retirement faster than they can replace them with younger inexperienced workers.  This means that they are not only facing reduced headcount, but also fewer experienced workers.

2. Eliminating In-house Developed Custom Code

IT departments in utilities and telecoms have realized that maintaining in-house developed custom code is expensive and are looking for COTS (commercial off the shelf) applications to replace their in-house developed code.

3. Breaking Down Barriers between Information Silos

The classic challenge that may utilities face is referred to as CAD/GIS integration, but there are other islands of information including construction, financial asset management, and operations.

4. Improving Flow of Design Information Between Field Staff and Records

The field staff are often frustrated by the poor quality of the facilities maps they receive with their work orders. They are also frustrated by business processes that more often than not discourage field workers from providing valuable information back to records about inaccuracies they observe in the field or about changes they have made. 

5. Resolving the As-built Problem

One of the major challenges in utilities and telecoms face is the “as-built” problem, a symptom of  which is the as-built backlog.

6. Eliminating Redundant Data

As Brad Williams of Gartner has so graphically pointed out, in many organizations the same information is captured and maintained independently by different groups within the organization .

7. Improving the Quality of the Facilities Database

Poor data quality has serious implications for the organization such as unreliable reports prepared for management and for regulators, which can lead to fines from the regulator, negative impacts on the productivity of field staff, longer times to respond to outages, and inhibiting the rapid deployment of new services because the design data critical for servicability calculations used to customer access to services such as broadband, cable, or power is either not available or unreliable.

8. Reducing Paper Flow

Organizations in all sectors are looking to reduce the flow of paper, not only as part of a green initiative to save trees, but also because paper flows result in data  and process redundancy, inhibit productivity, and impair the agility of the organization. 

9. Enabling Particpation

Organization want to enable everyone in the organization, as well as external users such as subcontractors and regulators with the appropriate security level, to access facilities data.

Risk

One of the things that everyone planning to address these issues is the question of risk.  Simply put, a firm planning to address the issues I've listed above can take either of two approaches.

Evolutionary

This approach that minimizes changes to existing workflows and attempts to leverage existing engineering and operations skills to minimize retraining, implement incremental changes to familiar business processes, and target extensions or enhancements to existing technology to address the specific issues I mentioned above.

Replacement

This approach seeks to replace existing workflows, retrain people in new processes, and replace existing technology with new technology.

I would suggest that the former is often less risky and frequently less expensive because you are building on what you already know and use.  For example, for a company with an engineering focus that has been using CAD desktop software and following engineering practices and workflows for many years, and whose consultants and contractors also use CAD software and follow the same workflows, the process of upgrading or enhancing the processes and software they are familiar with can be much less risky, than trying to replace existing with new workflows, replace existing with completely new software, and retrain everyone on the software and processes.