User Conference 2003 - Special Achievement in GIS

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Alliant Energy

Create an enterprise GIS for Alliant Energy to support merger of three separate utilities. The GIS provides a central database for all geospatial information to support all aspects of the company.

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Business Problem

Alliant Energy was formed in 1999 through the merger of three energy services providers: IES Industries, Interstate Power, and WPL Holdings.
The three previous energy businesses each maintained their own infrastructure to support GIS. The existing systems were heavily integrated into the business processes and included interfaces to the company's work management, outage management, ERP, maintenance systems, system planning, and customer information systems. In addition, one of the GIS solutions was used to solve a broad range of business problems, including environmental analysis, target marketing, organization development, regulatory compliance and real estate management. Multiple GIS systems resulted in higher costs, the need to develop solutions multiple times in different technologies, and inefficient response to customer needs. Alliant Energy saw the need to consolidate its GIS and business practices into one seamless, enterprise solution. By standardizing on one GIS platform and data model, Alliant Energy was able to significantly reduce our costs but also improve its ability to provide high-quality solutions to all of its employees. Alliant Energy has over 1000 employees that access the GIS.

Technology Implemented

Alliant Energy uses ArcInfo 8 professional GIS, ArcView GIS for the desktop, ArcReader, ArcIMS Internet software from ESRI, and the ArcFM and ArcFM Viewer software from Miner and Miner. The database is run on using HP Database servers operating an Oracle DBMS. Citrix Terminal servers are used for distributing the applications.

Development Team Biography

The core team consisted of 6 business analysts and 4 IT analysts/programmers from Alliant Energy. Additionally, the team received support from departments across the organization. ESRI and Miner and Miner provided consulting support for project leadership and technical support. Project oversight was provided by Alliant’s Office of Project Management and included a project manager, an executive sponsor, and project owner from the Energy Delivery business unit. In addition, contract programmers were used as needed through out the project.

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