Why ‘set and forget’ is not an option for your GIS capability — understanding technical debt and how it undermines business value.

PARTNER FEATURE

By Gary Wood, GIS for public safety and intelligence expert

In 1958, Chairman Mao’s impatience with the pace of development in China resulted in a decree known as The Great Leap Forward — an attempt to jump-start economic progress almost overnight by transforming China from a backward agrarian economy into an industrial powerhouse. History revealed this decree to be a disaster, causing a great famine and shrinking China’s productivity until 1976.

We see much the same happen on a cyclic pattern in complex IT environments, and legacy GIS environments are no different.

In the enterprise IT world, a characteristic of large organisations with complex systems is that of technical debt — a metaphor defining the gap between the things we know are wrong, incomplete, or not fit-for-purpose and the minimal optimal operating state.

This concept is not only restricted to things like software code or features, but impacts all elements of people, processes and technology.

Identifying technical debt in your organisation

Technical debt is creeping and insidious by nature and its contributors can exist both inside and outside an organisation.

In any large enterprise, base operational assets — including IT infrastructure, software, and the workforce — must be maintained: fixed, enhanced, trained, adapted and monitored consistently for necessary modifications and updates.

This is equally as true for an enterprise geospatial capability, especially if that capability is under the control of the IT function. Although it may not be recognised, decisions are constantly being made that contribute to technical debt.

For example, deferring a code change, patch or upgrade in a critical application to future release cycles because of cost or complexity is — in reality — kicking the proverbial risk can down the road and adding technical debt to the ledger.

For new, greenfield GIS customers, developing a business case that quantitatively demonstrates the business value and ROI of deploying enterprise GIS to automate, streamline, or provide faster time to insights, is pretty straightforward.

But consider another perspective…

So your organisation previously accepted the business case to invest in GIS technology — no doubt for a specific outcome — and you now need to pivot to a new approach to generate greater value. How do you deal with your accumulated technical debt?

If you have GIS technical debt, that delta must be costed into the updated, value-generating business case. This headwind will either limit ROI for the business case or negate the project’s value entirely.

It’s also important to consider that GIS technical debt — just like financial debt — has a very high (and increasing) interest rate. For technical debt, interest accumulates in the form of:

• The delta between the cost of change now and the cost of change later
• Loss of market share through lack of agility to respond to market shifts
• Productivity losses
• Stakeholder confidence in organisational capability
• Staff morale

And like financial debt, if not checked, you can find yourself reaching a tipping point where your technical debt levels take you into technical bankruptcy.

Payback time

You may be wondering at what point GIS technical debt demands repayment.

Simply put, this occurs when an organisation reaches GIS technical negative equity, whereby the cost of the changes required to pay down the technical debt exceeds the potential benefits gained.

This is common with organisations who have a long-term GIS capability as it becomes so deeply embedded into BAU, that they simply can’t envisage how this fundamental value generator can be something other than it is. It’s at this point companies start to question the cost of supporting and maintaining the status quo.

But ‘set and forget’ is never a good strategy.

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The changing landscape of vegetation management

Managing the risk of trees growing near power lines is one of the largest recurring expenses for electric utility companies and one of the largest predictive maintenance expenses across all sectors.

The global annual spend on vegetation management currently exceeds $6 billion and accounts for the major OPEX for most electric utilities in Australia.

Flooding will bring increased vegetation fuel loads in an around assets for the coming year, while bushfires carry the risk of vegetation bringing down powerlines, creating additional impacts on the community. A risk-based vegetation management approach can minimise these impacts, but there are only so many physical controls that can be put in place.

You can’t cut down every tree, which is why prioritisation is such an important part of a risk management strategy.

A growing number of utilities are accessing timely geospatial data and pairing it with smart technologies to provide asset insights.

Learn how leveraging these technologies and advanced analytics to optimise works programs can save utilities 10–15 per cent of their annual vegetation management spend.

Read the full blog here:

Wealth of real-time data driving common Games insight

In the English metropolitan county of West Midlands, a booming economy and rapidly growing population have placed unprecedented pressure on public transportation services and the local road network.

Construction traffic and building works for new rail stations and tram services are creating added disruption and increasing the challenges.

In a highly ambitious and collaborative project, Transport for West Midlands (TfWM) has developed a state-of-the-art ArcGIS Dashboard that combines live transport data from 17 public and private sector partners with crowd-sourced information.

The ArcGIS solution was developed in just two months and provides a single, real-time view of all transport issues across the road, rail, bus and tram networks, enabling the organisation, its partners and the police to quickly intervene.

TfWM’s dashboard is displayed on a large screen at its new Regional Transport Coordination Centre and can be viewed online by TfWM managers from any location.

The dashboard is also used by partners, in their own local operations centres including, Highways England, local authorities, transport providers and emergency services, giving everyone the same comprehensive overview of the status of all transportation services and roads, across the entire region.

The insight that TfWM will gain from analysing live traffic data will help to put effective plans in place for special events – including when Birmingham hosts the Commonwealth Games in 2022.

Learn how this real-time data is being used to respond rapidly to transport incidents, analyse patterns in transport usage and implement strategies to improve travel experiences across the region.

Read the full blog here:

Information supplied courtesy of Esri Australia. For more details, go to esriaustralia.com.au.