Regional Utility Networks

[MichaelParma]

Greetings,
I'm curious about people's thoughts on best practice for managing a regional or multi-organization utility network where the centralized organization does not own the data.

For example, let's say a regional water provider supplies 2 dozen cities and towns. For the region's business processes, it wants to create a UN to trace out the entire system. Each city owns its data and may have its own schema. In the past, the cities have submitted data which the region consolidated into a geometric network for tracing, basically rebuilding the whole system via script each time.

Any thoughts on how to best tackle a consolidation UN when source data comes from multiple organizations with differing non-UN schemas?

Thanks,
Mike

[RobertKrisher]

If you watch some of the presentations from the larger customers at conferences you'll see several customers talk about how they tackled this problem. In almost every case they will come up with a common model that each of their operating companies must adhere to. From there they typically allow each operating company to add additional fields/domains to the model to support regional/local standards and business processes.

Depending on the infrastructure they have available to them the customer will either deploy a single utility network that contains all the fields for the customers, or they will deploy separate utility networks for each region. Good examples of large utilities include who took the latter approach are:

• Duke Energy
• First Energy