Listen in as this episode also touches on the role of effective data governance in ensuring data quality, discussing the importance of maintaining high accuracy and ensuring data integrity across systems. Pat and Bill explore the exciting innovations and technologies currently taking hold in the sector to automate and streamline these processes, reducing the burden on employees and allowing utilities to focus on delivering efficient, reliable services. Given how enterprise access and data quality governance are key to running a successful, modern utility, you won’t want to miss this discussion.
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Thanks to the sponsor of this episode of the Energy Central Power Perspectives Podcast: Esri
Key Links:
Episode 1 of this three-part series, “Episode #178: “Breaking Boundaries: Cross-Industry Innovation at IMGIS 2024″ with Pat Hohl and Bill Meehan, Directors at ESRI [Special Energy Central Power Perspectives™ Podcast Presented by ESRI]”: https://energycentral.com/c/iu/episode-178-breaking-boundaries-cross-industry-innovation-imgis-2024-pat-hohl-and
Episode 2, “Episode #181: “Breaking Down Silos with GIS and Advanced Modeling in the Utility Sector” with Pat Hohl and Bill Meehan, Directors at ESRI [Special Energy Central Power Perspectives™ Podcast Presented by ESRI]”: https://energycentral.com/o/energy-central/episode-181-breaking-down-silos-gis-and-advanced-modeling-utility-sector-pat-hohl
GIS for Electric Utilities from ESRI: https://www.esri.com/en-us/industries/electric/overview
Other previous podcast appearances from Pat and Bill
Episode 10: ‘The Past & Future of Circuits & How GIS is Transforming the Grid, COVID-19 Response, & More’: https://energycentral.com/c/iu/energy-central-power-perspectives%E2%84%A2-podcast-episode-10-%E2%80%98-past-future-circuits-how
Episode 12: ‘To Unlock the Modern Utility, GIS is Key’: https://energycentral.com/c/iu/energy-central-power-perspectives%E2%84%A2-podcast-episode-12-%E2%80%98-unlock-modern-utility-gis
Episode 47: ‘GIS, Digital Twin, and the Intelligent Reality of Utilities Today’: https://energycentral.com/o/energy-central/special-edition-gis-digital-twin-and-intelligent-reality-utilities-today-pat-hohl
Episode 80: ‘Taking a Geographic Approach to Public Grid Investment’: https://energycentral.com/o/energy-central/episode-80-taking-geographic-approach-public-grid-investment-bill-meehan-and-pat
Episode 95: ‘Debating Utilities’ Role In Transportation Electrification’: https://energycentral.com/o/energy-central/episode-95-debating-utilities-role-transportation-electrification-esris-bill
Episode 131: ‘Unlocking the Power of GIS: Sharing, Understanding, and Capturing Utility Data’: https://energycentral.com/o/esri/special-episode-unlocking-power-gis-sharing-understanding-and-capturing-utility
Episode 132: ‘Harnessing GIS for Strategic Utility Insight’: https://energycentral.com/o/energy-central/special-episode-harnessing-gis-strategic-utility-insight-pat-hohl-and-bill-meehan
Episode 133: ‘The Role of GIS Data, Mobility, and Digital Twins’: https://energycentral.com/c/iu/special-episode-role-gis-data-mobility-and-digital-twins-pat-hohl-and-bill-meehan
Pat Hohl’s Energy Central Profile: energycentral.com/member/profile/204983/about
Bill Meehan’s Energy Central Profile: https://energycentral.com/member/profile/360/about
Ask a Question to Our Future Guests: Do you have a burning question for the utility executives and energy industry thought leaders that we feature each week on the Energy Central Power Perspectives Podcast? Do you want to hear your voice on a future episode? Well starting in 2024, we’re offering you that opportunity! Head to this link where you can leave us a recorded message, including a question you’re eager to have answered on a future episode of the podcast. We’ll listen through them, pick out the right guests in our upcoming lineup to address them, and you’ll hear yourself as a part of the conversation! Energy Central on SpeakPipe: www.speakpipe.com/EnergyCentralPodcast
TRANSCRIPT
Matt Chester:
Hello, and welcome podcast listeners to the third and final episode of the Special Esri takeover series on the Energy Central Power Perspectives Podcast. If you missed Episodes 1 and 2 of this series, they’ll be linked in the show notes, and you’ll want to catch those first as our guests, Pat Hohl and Bill Meehan—Directors at Esri—have been exploring the world of the modern, digitized utility. And they are going to wrap up that conversation in this episode by diving headfirst into the world of modern network management.
Specifically, listen in as Pat and Bill explore the essential areas of enterprise access and collaboration, as well as data quality and governance. You’ll hear from Bill and Pat as they share their insights on how effective collaboration across departments and strong data governance are critical to driving success in the utility sector. They’ll share stories and examples from their experiences, highlighting the importance of breaking down silos, enhancing communication, and maintaining high-quality data to ensure operational efficiency and regulatory compliance.
Bill Meehan:
Well, hello again for our next installment in three podcasts around network management and modern network management. So today we’re going to talk about two subjects, enterprise access and collaboration. Pat’s favorite subject is data quality and data governance. Of course, data quality and governance go together with quality because without data governance, you really don’t end up with data quality. So I’d like to tell a story about access and collaboration. When I worked for the power company, I used to love to drive around with the troubleshooters. The troubleshooters were single person crews in a bucket truck and they would drive around, they would be on 24 hours a day, and they would check the system out, or if there was an issue, the dispatcher from the office would call the troubleshooter and he or she would go out and see what’s going on.
So I went with Paul the troubleshooter one day, and I remember we were driving around and he saw something he didn’t like, and I think it was maybe a recloser or something like that. It was up on a pole. So he pulled over and he looked at me kind of funny because I was the head of operations, I was the VP of operations. He looked at me kind of funny like he didn’t want me to see what he was doing.
So as he looked up at the pole, he said, “Bill, you’re not going to like what I’m going to do.” I was going to say, what is he going to do? I don’t know. Well, anyway, he reached under the seat of this truck and pulled out a massive map book that he opened up and he flipped to the right page. It was an old map that wasn’t even GIS, it was somebody who made it a long time ago. But he had very neat red notes on this map book because he was on the shift and he wanted to make sure he had, so he found the recloser or whatever equipment was.
I said to him, I said, “Paul, what are you doing? You’ve got all these documents, you should give them over to the GIS group.” He said, “No. I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to because I’m afraid if I give it to them, they won’t get it right.” Or whatever. So what really that happened with Paul, I said, “Well, what happens when the next shift goes on? They don’t have copies of all this stuff.” He’s like, “Well, yeah, but I want to make sure I do the right thing.”
This lack of collaboration really resulted in people hoarding information, and that’s the absolute wrong thing to do. As much as Paul wanted to do a good job, he was really violating a principle of good access and good communication. One of the things that I really love about the new technology that we’ve implemented is it doesn’t just rely on desktop.
It’s kind of cross-platform. It uses web services to be able to collaborate and communicate just like social media does. I always think of if my granddaughter is doing a little dance and my daughter wants to take a picture of her doing the dance, she would take a picture, and in the old days you’d go and have it developed and maybe a week later you get a picture or a video or whatever it is. Nowadays, it just happens immediately. I can just see that happens right now over my phone or my tablet or my desk. It doesn’t really matter. So, this access is so important.
I follow sports and I love football, and one of the things that really makes a good team, it’s talent for sure, but everybody in the professional football is talented, but if they’re not collaborating and coordinating with one another, things just fall apart. People miss tackles, they just don’t know what they’re doing. So this access and collaboration is just a critical thing to really doing a good job that’s going to differentiate the ability of access and ease of access, not just internal to the company, but even externally with regulators and customers and vendors. That’s going to mean the difference between a really, really good efficient cost-effective utility and one that is just mediocre. What do you think, Pat?
Pat Hohl:
Yep. I think you’re spot on. I like to follow Adam Grant on social media, and I read something just the other day on the way home on the airplane, and this is what he said, “The hallmark of expertise is no longer how much you synthesize, because when information was scarce, that rewarded knowledge acquisition. But with the information abundance that we have today, that requires pattern recognition.” He went on to say, “It’s not enough to collect the facts, but the future belongs to those who can connect the dots.”
To me, that’s what you’re really talking about here is enabling the digital utility to connect the dots for all of those silos of information and make it available to employees, to customers, to regulators, everyone that needs that. Many utilities are gas and electric, sometimes electric and water, or any possible combination. I really look to the gas utilities because I think they’re leading us in terms of tracking and traceability and regulatory compliance. There’s a lot of work that done in the gas world around this idea of having a more detailed model, as we talked about last time, but making that more accessible to users in the field, to capturing more precise data, not only in terms of positional accuracy, but using barcodes and storing all that information in a straightforward way that is usable and accessible throughout the organization.
We’re also seeing things like bringing in the design group and making that much more closely tied to everything else that’s going on within the utility. Many utilities are justifying their efforts simply on improving their planning process and their design process.
Bill Meehan:
You’re speaking about gas companies, one gas company that we’ve worked with, it’s called Enbridge. What I think they’ve really said is that it’s so important for access of information between the distribution and the gas transmission systems. That level of collaboration between the two is so important. I think one of the things that really inhibits a lot of what that kind of collaboration is, is silos. You sometimes call them silos of excellence, and that really is a detriment. By having this level of access and collaboration, you’re effectively breaking down silos and being able to communicate departments with one another. We have to organize by departments. People can’t just do everything and everything.
But still, having the ability to see what your neighbors are doing. By neighbors, I mean the neighbors in the department, like engineering and operations. We used to kid when I was in engineering for a long time, and we always said that the people in the field, they didn’t ever really appreciate what was going on in engineering. Then I ended up running field operations and it was like, oh wait, the people in the office don’t appreciate what’s going on in the field. They don’t get it. They don’t see. They’re not there. But the thing is, with this level of this kind of interoperability between say the office workers and the mobile workers, they’re able to see and appreciate what’s going on in the other areas.
So yeah, this whole notion of access and collaboration. I think of one particular company as well is from Denmark, beautiful country, beautiful people, wonderful, Andel. They’re using this interoperability we talked about it in the last podcast of SIM to ADMS. But it’s more than just the interoperability, it’s also the ability to access information from the operations and into the mobile workers. That’s really fantastic. So let’s switch gears a little bit here and step on some of Pat’s pet peeves called data quality. Pat, why are you so unhappy with data quality? Tell me a little bit about some stories about data quality.
Pat Hohl:
Oh, I don’t know that I’m unhappy about data quality, but it means a lot to me because I did some early work in GIS for utilities. It’s been many years ago now. Part of that process was converting paper records to electronic GIS records. That is a difficult process, and it got me very close to the notions of data quality. So I would start by saying, what in the world is data quality? That could mean a lot of different things.
I have seen systems where plus or minus 40 feet was good enough. I’ve seen other systems where plus or minus one foot just isn’t going to cut it. So positional accuracy is certainly important, but if you think about attributes of the data quality could mean how many blanks are in the dataset, or how many attributes are inconsistent? It’s marked a transformer, but the size is given for that of a capacitor.
So one of the things that I’m really excited about the new technology in Esri Utility Network is that there are rules and associations and attribute rules that are enforced to help maintain the data quality without the user having to note everything. We keep piling on more things for individuals to remember. I say the more things we can eliminate for people to remember, the better off we’re going to be. That’s what I’m excited about utility network, it helps maintain those things and gives the user the ability to bounce off of that and leverage that without having to remember a lot of things. So just picture, you’re going to add a new gizmo to the system. Once you tell us what kind of gizmo it is, we already know your set of choices have gone down from 1000 to four, and you just have to tell us which one it is and we’ve got it the right way.
So I think that it’s really, really important because I always like to work AI in here. Analytics and artificial intelligence, we’re going to become more and more reliant on these things. To the extent that we do, we’re going to have to have data that we can count on. Forward-looking utilities are looking at their data quality, and I’ve known many utilities that have ripped back the hood and said, okay, let’s really analyze what we have here. I’ve never seen one that came away and said, well, it’s a lot better than we thought. It’s usually the exact opposite. Oh, we didn’t realize that between the years of 2015 and 2019, we weren’t maintaining that bit of data, so it’s all blank for those years, and things like that. So built-in capability helps you uncover those data issues and be smart about how you fix them. I bet you’ve run into a few examples.
Bill Meehan:
When I worked at the power company, I always had this idea… Like I was saying, I’d go out with Paul and sometimes I would take a GIS map and look and say, “Hey, it says there’s a transformer up on that pole, but it’s not there. What happened? What, did somebody steal it? It’s not there anymore.” So what happens when you have poor data quality? It’s just more expensive because, all right, so we had to do some maintenance on that transformer on that switch, but it’s not there. So are we going to go look around and maybe it’s on the adjacent pole? How did it get switched around? Well, because we didn’t have the right process. All of data quality, and that’s what data governance is, is coming up with the right process. That’s why this model is so good because it helps us to, like you were saying with artificial intelligence, it’ll help us to do the right process and it’ll do it simply as opposed to complexity. I don’t even know if that’s a word.
But one of the things as you were talking Pat, it just reminded me of another thing. You were talking about AI. But also I think that this whole notion of using imagery is becoming much, much more important in terms of data quality because now we think something is like this or we think it looks like that, but with some of this advanced imagery, satellite imagery, drone imagery, LIDAR, we can now begin to say, you can take all of this imagery and get it really quickly, and now we can do analysis to say, is our data really right?
I’ve been dealing with transmission as I said earlier, a lot of transmission companies really don’t know exactly where their towers are. They know it’s approximately there. You were talking about 40 feet versus one foot. But if they don’t know exactly where these towers are located, when they look at sag of the transmission lines and there’s maybe a hill in between the two towers, that could make a difference between operating correctly and not operating correctly. They could flash over because they don’t have the right location, or they don’t have the right access, or access roads or they don’t have any of that sort of stuff. So imagery is becoming really important.
Finally, I want to talk about a subject that is very, very dear to my heart, and it’s this notion of a digital twin. Sometimes people say, well, what the heck is a digital twin? It’s just a buzzword that people throw around. But it is not. If we really believe in the notion of a digital twin and what is a digital twin, it is a data model. It’s a model of the real system. It looks like the real system. So if we’re going to do that, we’ve got to make sure that our data is correct and that you take the data from that digital twin and model it in the utility network to be able to do things precisely. It’s all about precision.
So we talked about access and collaboration, talked about data quality and governance, and I think this is really the key. Those four things in the webcast we did earlier is on modeling, interoperability and integration, and we talk about enterprise access collaboration, and we talk about data quality. If we do all of those things. Like I had the idea of a good team, we’ll have a good team and we’ll have an efficient and effective operation so that we can meet the challenges going forward. So with that, Pat, do you have any final thoughts?
Pat Hohl:
One final thought. A lot of what we’ve talked about sounds complicated, and I don’t want listeners to think that’s only for big utilities. There are many small utilities. I was just reading about one today that’s up in your neck of the woods in the Northeast, Hull Municipal Light, relatively small-
Bill Meehan:
Right on the ocean.
Pat Hohl:
… community of 10,000 people. They’re adopting these principles in this technology. At the other end of the spectrum, you talked about Hong Kong Electric, gigantic utility, lots of work there. It’s ingrained into my brain what they said. They wanted to migrate to a standard sustainable GIS environment with minimal customization. Boy, I read that last part and I thought that’s exactly it. So many of us have existed in an environment where it was very intense customization and it was very difficult to change and to move. Those days are fading away as we move to a more standard operating environment with minimal customization that can give us much better analytics and data for our AI and ultimately reduce cost and improve customer service.
Bill Meehan:
That’s right.
Pat Hohl:
Take a look at the e-book. There’s a lot in there.
Bill Meehan:
That’s right. So I want to thank everybody for listening in to us speaking about these subjects and we’ll see you next time on our next podcast.
About Energy Central Podcasts
The ‘Energy Central Power Perspectives™ Podcast’ features conversations with thought leaders in the utility sector. At least twice monthly, we connect with an Energy Central Power Industry Network community member to discuss compelling topics that impact professionals who work in the power industry. Some podcasts may be a continuation of thought-provoking posts or discussions started in the community or with an industry leader that is interested in sharing their expertise and doing a deeper dive into hot topics or issues relevant to the industry.
The ‘Energy Central Power Perspectives™ Podcast’ is the premiere podcast series from Energy Central, a Power Industry Network of Communities built specifically for professionals in the electric power industry and a place where professionals can share, learn, and connect in a collaborative environment. Supported by leading industry organizations, our mission is to help global power industry professionals work better. Since 1995, we’ve been a trusted news and information source for professionals working in the power industry, and today our managed communities are a place for lively discussions, debates, and analysis to take place. If you’re not yet a member, visit www.EnergyCentral.com to register for free and join over 200,000 of your peers working in the power industry.
The Energy Central Power Perspectives™ Podcast is hosted by Jason Price, Community Ambassador of Energy Central. Jason is a Business Development Executive at West Monroe, working in the East Coast Energy and Utilities Group. Jason is joined in the podcast booth by the producer of the podcast, Matt Chester, who is also the Community Manager of Energy Central and energy analyst/independent consultant in energy policy, markets, and technology.
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