In the past decade, it was easy to be dazzled by the advances in Information Technology (IT) across the utility industry. The software driving systems such as Geographical Information Systems (GIS), Outage Management Systems (OMS), Mobile Workforce Management (MWM) and Automated Meter Reading (AMR) have made stunning advances in capability in recent years, promising bottom line increases in performance and reliability metrics such as SAIDI and SAIFI. Many utilities eagerly snapped up these offerings, fueled by both the fear and promise of competition as well as regulatory mandates. Investments have been made in these Commercial-off-the-Shelf (COTS) solutions as well as custom developed applications. As the COTS capabilities have grown, less production of in-house software is required to meet core needs such as outage management, and more effort is placed on developing "glue" code to make systems work together and to build applications upon a COTS foundation. Utilities are continually faced with the need to upgrade these systems, as well as for systems to better communicate and integrate with each other. The demand for integrated systems that meet overall business objectives, and not just isolated business functionality, continues to grow.
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