I have blogged in the past (here, here, here and here) about the poor data quality of utility records databases that has serious implications.  It can lead to  such things as unreliable reports prepared for management and for regulators, poor productivity of field staff, longer times to respond to outages, and longer times to deploy new services because the design data critical for serviceability calculations used to customer access to services such as broadband, cable, or power is either not available or unreliable.

One of the problems is the “as-built problem”. The engineering design team typically use a CAD tool to design network infrastructure.  The network records group often use a traditional GIS application to maintain a record of the network infrastructure after it is constructed.  After construction is complete, construction drawings come back to the records team as paper drawings called as-builts.  Because of a perceived incompatibility between engineering design drawings and GIS requirements, records staff often redigitize construction drawings from paper into the records database.  As a result there is a backlog of as-builts waiting to be entered into the records database which can stretch anywhere from months to several years which means that the records database is always out of date.

At the URISA conference last week I heard a talk by Karen Stewart, who is based in British Columbia, in which she mentioned a set of standards for specifications and drawings for municipal construction projects that has been widely adopted in British Columbia. The Master Municipal Construction Documents Association maintains a set of templates for tendering and contract administration for municipal infrastructure projects that is geared toward government, consultants, contractors, and owners.  The documents are appropriate for municipal works projects, both underground and street level.

The documents include MMCD Templates for AutoCad Civil 3D for construction and record drawings that provide a common CAD standard that is is expected to enable comparability and consistency of presentation across the province.  The Civil 3D template project is focused on “internal drawing structure, external drawing presentation, and post construction GIS submissions”.  This strikes me as having potentially far-reaching implications for municipal utilities because it is taking a standards-based approach toward resolving the as-built problem that arises from the inefficient way that engineering design data currently flows within many utilities.