Multi-headed Dragons - Part III

In my last two postings I dealt with the Provincial and local government relationships within the ICIS family. In this posting I will take a look at the utility companies - the final group of the founding ICIS members.

To a large extent, I have found utility companies the easiest to deal with in terms of their wants and needs. That's not to say that there are no issues but simply that their issues are often much easier to resolve than those within local government and between local government and the Province.

Now, before I go further, I should also note that the utility companies do pay the majority of the bills that keep ICIS going (including my own compensation) so I'll state up front that my glowing view of utilities is perhaps tainted. Having said that, here are my thoughts. . .

The utility companies business aligns nicely with that of local government. Their needs for information are almost identical (in fact, a local government operates its infrastructure as a utility). The only major differences between the two is that utility company interests generally span jurisdictional boundaries (like the Province) and they are in business to make money (the Province and local government are not. . . well, not supposed to be anyway).

The business rationale for utilities to participate in ICIS is primarily to save time (not have to go to 200 different agencies for data) which, in turn, saves money. If utility companies saw no return for their investment they would not participate. It's as simple as that.

There are two interesting rub-points with respect to the utility members however. First, is the issue of positional accuracy of the utility infrastructure in relation to local government data. In some areas utility data was not mapped in relation to local government data so sharing becomes problematic. If the pipes don't line up with local government rights-of-way then the data becomes of little use to a local government for the purpose of locating foreign (other utilities other than the municipality) services. In this situation there is little motivation on the part of the utility to move its data since, like local governments, the data meets their own internal business needs. Moving the data would cost money providing little return to the utility's business operations. The result is some tension between some local government and some utility members. Doubly interesting is that this problem works the other way as well. Some local governments have poor positionally accurate data yet still insist on utility companies to provide accurate information.

The second rub-point with respect to the utility members is competition. When ICIS was originally formed the founding utility members were largely non-competitive amongst each other. That is, there was one gas company, one hydro company, one telephone company and one cable company. Now, as new utility companies want to join ICIS and existing members are providing services similar to other members (Shaw and Telus for phone service for example) there becomes some discomfort about sharing infrastructure data between these other members. It somewhat surprises me that, for the most part, this has caused little problem within the ICIS family. I find it hard to imagine that this sort of arrangement could work in the United States where corporate data security seems of much higher importance. In the end, it is the general cooperative nature that we see at ICIS that has got us this far. It's quite remarkable and quite Canadian!