Do's and Don'ts of Selecting a GIS Solution

摘要

The task to selecting a GIS solution for a utility business is exhausting. Where to start, how to break it down, what's real and what's not and more important what does it all mean in the first place. GIS for the utility is really a tool for your operations group, much like CAD is for your design group. I like to think of GIS as the Engineering Information System (EIS) for Utility Operations Management. While our EIS application, SPLASH, has been around for 13 years, it's been the success of the past eight years that has leveraged the original multi-million dollar investment in the technology into the support of our daily operational needs. The City of San Diego Utility GIS Program has undergone a minimum of five GIS evaluations during the past 15 years despite being a huge success since converting to a new GIS platform in 1995. The first evaluation was to get the program started. The second evaluation was to convert to enterprise architecture, and fix productivity and performance issues. The purpose of the final three evaluations has been to demonstrate to City IT management that the 'city standard' GIS software does not meet the requirements of the Utility GIS Program. After spending thousands of hours laboring over requirements, benchmarking, and analyzing the differences between the two GIS vendors multiple times we finally discovered an easier approach that put cold, hard budget figures up front and easy to explain to top management. This paper is being presented in order to take the complexity out of the selecting a GIS solution. Providing the GIS Solution Selection Team with the guidelines, tactics and processes for developing early financial information for recommendations based on solid, vendor neutral data you'll need the following recipe for taking the guess work out of the ordeal.