Developing an Enterprise GIS
An analysis of the business basis for being involved that reflects the advantages of the involvement for that partner;
A "philosophical" basis - an agreement in the vision, that there are advantages to pursuing a partnership;
An agreement document/understanding which provides the relationship basis and describes the responsibilities of the partners.
Challenges and Potential Solutions for Romania
The challenge we faced was to manage geospatial information across 53 departmental units and more than 200 processes. And we discovered that in our case, geospatial information meant 389 layers with more than 4000 distinct characteristics... and that managing it meant data and system functions seamlessly integrated with those typically found in ERP, CRM, Document Management and other systems in a way totally transparent for the user", says Ioana Raicu, Management Information Director at Bucharest City Hall, about the most ambitious single IT project launched by a Romanian public administration. While this level of complexity on the problem side might not come as a surprise for anyone familiar with the operations of major municipalities around the world, the decision of this particular municipality to go ahead and develop a state-of-the-art information system with such a daring goal, on the solution side, could be somewhat surprising for those familiar with the relative sluggishness of public administration in adopting cutting edge technology and practices.
But if you take a closer look at the geospatial solution market in Romania, you could conclude that such solutions are quickly becoming standard and that this is one of the most demanding GIS markets in the world. Bucharest City Hall is not the only customer expecting what was formerly known as GIS to get out of its departmental and technological box and merge into the mainstream management and workflow information systems [3]. When the Romanian national power grid operator, Transelectrica, started a major upgrade of its information systems in 2002, the ultimate priority for this giant company was to become internationally competitive, by massive cost reductions, and to align its operations with the European UCTE standards and requirements.
All of which Transelectrica could not accomplish without an effective management of enterprise wide geospatial information along its entire life cycle, enabling hundreds of users to manage a network of 8800 km of power lines and 76 power stations. The solution, currently in its rollout phase, is based on integrated geospatial resources, power modeling, outage and work order management systems and MIS [7].
Another exemple is represented by APATERM [4]. APATERM provides utility services to Oradea, a city of approximately 230,000 inhabitants on the western border of Romania. The utility's complex infrastructure encompasses citywide water, heating, sewer, and storm-water networks. The challenge of managing such an elaborate infrastructure, with almost 1,800 kilometers of pipes, led
company management to consider implementing geospatial technology. After evaluating the available technologies, APATERM contracted the development of a network maintenance system with Intergraph Computer Services
(ICS) Romania Ltd., a Team GeoMedia
Registered Solutions Provider.
In order to develop a geospatial solution that is fully capable of becoming the backbone of an enterprisewide information system, ICS Romania decided to combine GeoMedia with the customer's
existing environment, which included Microsoft Windows, SQL Server, and
several custom applications. The first major step toward this goal was to redesign the main database to meet the requirements of the new functionality of the system. Professionals then deployed GeoMedia Professional and GeoMedia PublicWorks Manager for the creation and maintenance of geospatial data.
The new system began to look like a solution when core business processes in network maintenance were automated with the help of Web-based custom
applications that were developed on top of GeoMedia WebMap. During the testing phase, APATERM management realized the full potential of spatially enabled information and decided to expand this system for use by the entire company. The inherent scalability of GeoMedia WebMap and Web-based applications made this possible. The initial deployment was finalized in late 2002. The new system now supports multiple major functions, including network design and modeling, real-time monitoring of critical parameters, outage management, and permit processing. Possibly the most important gain for APATERM is the
ability to generate management information, which is primarily a result of
spatial analysis capabilities. Strategic decisions, as well as routine work orders, are now based on spatially enabled
information generated by this system and displayed on management control panels that are powered by GeoMedia WebMap.
According to APATERM's technical director, Constantin Tomulescu, "Both the management team and the staff have fully accepted this new system because of its ease of use. ICS Romania's experts have successfully customized Intergraph products and integrated them into our system, responding to our needs and improving our business processes."
In 2003, project managers decided to extend the system by gradually transferring more of the department-centric existing applications into the new
integrated work environment. They will accomplish this task by rewriting the applications as Web-based applications that are integrated with GeoMedia WebMap.
Besides the three showcase projects already mentioned, ICS Romania has had the opportunity to implement some other similarly large and daring solutions:
The Romanian Railways Company has started operation of IRIS (Integrated Railway Information System) in 2002. This system is used nation wide (5000 users) and integrates GIS and ERP for railway infrastructure management.
CNLO, the largest Romanian coal mining company with a yearly output of 35 million tons of coal, is currently deploying its new system for integrated management of cadastral, topographical and geological data with ERP.
The National Agency for Mineral Resources has benefited from a World
Bank financing project which translated into a state-of-the-art information system that allows this agency to manage the Romanian Mining Cadastre and Mineral Titles Registry.
Conclusions
Such high demands need a matching offer from local providers of geospatial solutions. Selling GIS software is only the tip of the iceberg, since in projects of such complexity and magnitude the main added value comes from the provider's ability to analyze and model the customer's daily activities, its workflows and business processes, how they all interact, or to solve problems like integrating CRM and ERP with automated mapping and spatial databases in a single functional solution.
Most of the times, the customer's request is no more or less than to integrate data pertaining to many business processes into a single database that would feed information to a variety of automated systems and applications, in order to provide a geographical and relational inventory for all infrastructure assets, maintaining geographic and survey maps for the entire network, managing workflows, maintenance operations and other projects and, of course, monitoring costs.
Solving all these requirements calls for developing a geospatial solution, as opposed to delivering mere GIS software. Recent projects have shown very clearly that geospatial solutions play the role of the missing functional link between various enterprise information islands and that geospatial information should be looked at as the foundation of an effective management and decision information system. While effective, such solutions have also proved rather difficult to develop.
It takes years of expertise in complex project implementations to be able to solve demands as the ones in the examples above.
References
- Campbell, H. and Ian Masser, 1995, „GIS and Organizations”, London, UK; Bristol, PA: Taylor & Francis;
- Tai On Chan, Ian P. Williamson, 1999, „The different identities of GIS and GIS diffusion”, International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 13(3);
- Foca, M., (2004), in “How far would you go with your GIS”, Romanian IT&C Directory, Oct. 2004, pp. 31
- Global Link, 2003, Intergraph Mapping and Geospatial Solutions, „Romania Water Utility improves services city wide”, International Newsletter, Issue 1 2003
- Nicholas Jacquez, „From Business Data to Marketplace Intelligence TM” , The White Paper, available at: www.terraseer.com
- Keating, G.N., Rich, P.M., Witkowski, M.S, 2003, „Challenges for Enterprise GIS”, in URISA Journal, Vol. 15, No. 2, available at: http://www.urisa.org/Journal/Vol15 No2/Keating.pdf
- Loghin, Cristina, 2004, „Transelectrica a pariat pe GIS”, in Market Watch IT7C, April 2004, pp.2-3
- Rogers, E.M., 1983, „Diffusion of Innovation”, 3rd ed. New York: The Free Press.
- Rogers, E.M., 1993, „The diffusion of innovation model”, in Diffusion and Use of Geographic Information Technologies, I. Masser and H.J. Onsrud eds. Dordecht /Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers
- James L. Sipes , 2005, „Spatial Technologies: Software Strategy: Options for the Enterprise - Organizations increase efficiency by sharing resources and applications” available at: http://gis.cadalyst. com/gis/article/articleDetail.jsp?id=141055
- Witkowski, M.S., P.M. Rich, and G.N. Keating. 2004. Enterprise GIS design. New Mexico Geographic Information Council, Fall Meeting. (November 20, 2003)