We’re probably still guilty of putting data into silos and we need to find ways to make it mainstream and ask whether there a GIS approach to unlocking that data. “One of the areas where we haven’t yet gone is using the GIS view of the world to index the nest of data we’re sitting on. The user base are not natural computer users, and we still have offices where BT is quoting us several thousands of pounds to run relatively low-bandwidth lines. “The thing I’m quite frustrated about is that there’s been a lot of using GIS to solve specific problems but I’d like to get to the point where we mould the application around the data. We couldn’t run the business without maps. We use it for visualisations, showing what the landscape could look like, for building roads and so on. “I suppose we could run without GIS because once upon a time we had to, but the business is dependent on it now and it’s very efficient – we spend less money because of it. In our business it’s incredibly important for data to be as accurate and up to date as possible.ĭavid Felstead, Director of IS at the Forestry Commission, the largest provider of outdoor recreation facilities in the UK So why not draw it direct in the GIS like an acetate layer? You press a button and the design record gets promoted to a live asset. In the old world you would have a field service where assets described in CAD systems would be printed off and field staff would mark up changes and send them back to update the record. “We got down to five or six key systems for all our business processes for things like emergency gas escapes or planned repairs, tying it to an SAP-centric single asset repository on which we could add visualisation for asset data, schedule & dispatch and so on. It was a fantastic opportunity because large utilities don’t often get a clean sheet of paper to transform their IT, so we looked at best practice to reengineer our business processes and saw GIS as a great front end. When the company formed a few years ago, we had an aggressive timeline to replace all the IT systems we needed to run the business. We have assets in the ground over a very dispersed geography and a field force to service and maintain them. Beware the 9 warning signs of bad IT architecture and see why these 10 old-school IT principles still rule.
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