The Top 5 Things I’ve Learned About Utility Network

February 11, 2020 — Isaac King

If you’ve been paying attention to the evolution of the Utility Network for more than a few months, you’ve probably formed some opinions and expectations about what the platform and project will look like. I know that prior to joining SSP, I had ideas about what the Utility Network meant and how a project was likely to look. I’m here to tell you that I’ve come across more than a few surprises and want to share with you 5 of the most important things I’ve learned to date.

#1 Your architecture requirements / changes may not be as drastic as you think

Somewhere along the road, I heard things like “your entire infrastructure is going to change with the Utility Network” and I’m sure I’ve regurgitated this somewhere myself. Well, here’s the newsflash; this may not be true for all of you. Those of you with established ArcGIS Enterprise environments, especially those of you who may have engaged Esri for architecture / capacity planning as part of a Portal implementation – may already have the majority of your future state infrastructure in place (or at least documented). You may read between the lines here and think I’m hinting at actions you can take to prepare yourself for UN. You wouldn’t be wrong…

#2 You might be looking at your project in the wrong order

Remember the days when you had to select your entire product stack before implementing any of it? Namely, your entire suite of design applications – since they were built on top of ArcMap? Well, those days are gone. It’s no coincidence that the advancement of the UN (which also means the potential for more advanced workflows) is accompanied by the departure from ArcGIS Desktop based design tools. This means you can choose to look at your desktop edit solution and design solution independent of one another. Of course, there are many of you with a situation or timeline that may still necessitate the selection of an entire stack at once; for the rest of you, give some thought to how you really need to approach your UN or design tool project.

#3 Utility Network implementations are still significant investments (for now)

As someone who started their career in a small utility, I want there to be an easy way to scale these projects down to a budgetary number that’s reasonable for a small-to-medium sized utility budget. You’ve heard us say “this isn’t just an upgrade” and, well, it’s not. While you may not need to replace your entire infrastructure, you ARE looking at replacing pieces of a system that’s become an integral piece of your business and likely has the integrations to prove it. As regulatory, environmental and consumer demands are driving change across our industry, our technology must follow suit. And the utility network may be a foundational technology that will allow your business to keep pace with the demands coming now and in the future. The new technology and the opportunity it affords for modernizing your GIS overall provides a lot of value – so make sure you are taking advantage of it. We are working diligently to establish repeatable processes that will reduce the overall cost for small and medium sized utilities in the near future. So work with us in the meantime to support this ongoing effort knowing that efficiencies are on their way.

#4 The future is NOT desktop-centric

This has been an “aha moment” with several projects so far. We’ve conditioned ourselves to thinking about desktop functions, workflows and users – and for good reason – our design suite lived on the desktop. As I mentioned in item #2 above, these conjoined twins have been separated. The future is web and mobile (as you may have noticed by all the apps, widgets and gidgets that Esri has been releasing over the last handful of years). Now this is definitely exciting, but it also brings about a host of changes you may not have anticipated. For example, do you have a Portal governance strategy in place? Who’s allowed to create what maps and apps and will your internal users know who to contact when something goes wrong?

#5 You might not have enough data

There are so many opportunities provided with the utility network by leveraging functionality like attribute rules, constraint rules, propagation and logical connectivity – but they all require data. Much of this data may not currently exist in your GIS, so you may want to start looking around the enterprise for data sources. Do you want to prevent a service from being connected if it will overload the transformer? You’re going to need load information! Do you really want to be able to execute a trace from a generation facility all the way down to a service point (or “turbine to toaster” as a colleague in Kentucky would say)? Well, you’re going to need substation data (check out the article David Miller recently posted on this topic). Overall this trend is a good one and supports the industry’s goal of creating a digital twin of the real utility world which will support the advanced analytics required by the modern utility.

That’s it, I’m done learning about Utility Network now…

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