The Data Core: How Utilities Can Optimize Operations by Concentrating Data

By Gary Wong

Water and wastewater utilities have often been viewed as lagging other sectors when it comes to maximizing the use of data within their organizations. That is not to say that the sector lacks data: SCADA systems collect and store data at intervals of fractions of a second; billing systems have decades of historic data on consumption, population change and demographic shifts; GIS and CMMS systems chronicle the condition of assets in time and space. The problem is there is often no unified way of accessing all this data for analysis and as a result only a fraction of data collected by utilities is analyzed and turned into actionable information.