Just consider the work being done by BC Hydro, Canada's third-largest electric utility. Since it started integrating GIT with its work management system in the early 1990s, BC Hydro has developed enabling tools and support for all levels of staff in many utility processes, resulting in more efficient design, construction, operation and maintenance as well as improved customer satisfaction. To better understand BC Hydro's success, however, consider how far GIT has come in the last few years.
All utilities revolve around the efficient and effective use of assets.
Initially, unintelligent mapping recorded asset locations. Later systems performed basic modeling of real-world networks for analysis and planning, and they included a database to store attributes. In limited cases, integration with other utility databases and applications slowly began to occur. The enterprise focus that's common today didn't exist. Data standards gained importance, and data were leveraged among common applications and shared across the enterprise to reduce costs as a prerequisite for GIS project approvals.