| Annual Utility Spending on GIS Tools and Services Will Reach $3.7 Billion by 2017 Spatial data underlies everything an electric utility does. The adoption of smart grid technologies by electric utilities is driving renewed attention and increasing investment in GIS and related applications. The geographic information system (GIS) is a foundational technology linking every activity of an electric utility - including design and construction, asset management, workforce management, outage management, and, increasingly, real-time grid operations. "The smart grid has energized electric utilities to think creatively about how to improve the delivery of electrical power and the business and workflow processes that enable it," says vice president Bob Gohn. Broadly speaking, there are eight core GIS-related utility applications in use or nearing deployment today, and they fit into three categories of market maturity: applications already adopted by a majority of utilities, including automated mapping and facilities management, back office, and plant and facility design and construction systems; applications experiencing wide-spread adoption over the next few years, such as asset, mobile workforce, and outage management; and newly emerging GIS-integrated tools, such as advanced distribution management and advanced metering infrastructure. According to a new report from Pike Research , utility spending on GIS services, software, and tools will increase steadily over the next five years, reaching $3. The challenges to the effective adoption and use of these systems in the electric utility market involve data complexity and quality, mobile workforce requirements, loss of existing GIS knowledge and skills through retirement, organizational structure, and the GIS vendor ecosystem. Annual Utility Spending on GIS Tools and Services Will Reach $3.7 Billion by 2017 |
Thursday, 5 April 2012
Annual Utility Spending on GIS Tools and Services Will Reach $3.7 Billion by 2017
