Hexagon Safety & Infrastructure

In this podcast, I talk with Hexagon Safety & Infrastructure’s Senior Enterprise Architect David Goedecke about how EdgeFrontier - our application integration platform - can improve ROI on public safety technologies. Enjoy. Laura Beth: Thank you for joining us for an Intergraph SG&I podcast. In today’s podcast, we are talking with David Goedecke who is a senior enterprise architect with Intergraph’s Public Safety and Security division. David is based in our Melbourne, Australia office. David, thank you for joining us. David: It’s my pleasure. Laura Beth: David is here to talk about something that everyone wonders, and that’s “how can you increase your return on investment from the public safety solutions you’ve implemented?” David, first tell us about your role at Intergraph SG&I? David: I’m the senior enterprise architect for our public safety business in Australia and Southeast Asia. I’m responsible for understanding what our customers and prospective customers require from their public safety solution and how it will fit into their business. I then craft a solution, which could comprise Intergraph technology, technology from partner companies and other third parties, and professional services. Sometimes this is to add additional capability to an existing customer, but other times it is for a brand new prospect. Laura Beth: What do you hear from customers on the return on investment they want from their public safety solutions? David: That’s a great question. A public safety solution rarely exists in isolation within an organization, and in fact is often embedded deeply within the agency. In the case of computer-aided dispatch, the initial emergency call for service is the first contact that the agency has with a member of the community who needs their assistance, and nearly all activities in that organization follow from that initial call. What this means is these solutions need to connect to and exchange information with many other systems throughout the enterprise. Not just other public safety systems but also human resources systems, financial systems, workforce and ERP systems, and even in some cases inventory and retail point-of-sale systems. Because of this, agencies see a large total cost of ownership, and a need to be responsive to change both within and outside organizations. Laura Beth: What are some ways customers can increase their return on investment? David: In IT project management there is always tension. There’s a tension that has to be managed between time, cost, and quality implementing a project. Now a customer can skew this triangle in their favor by doing things like reducing the effort and cost to build and maintain integrations, promoting reusability, and standardizing algorithms and data processing workflows. Overall, this can improve financial performance and organizational responsiveness. Laura Beth: So let’s talk about EdgeFrontier and bring that into the discussion. What are some of the key features of it? David: EdgeFrontier is Intergraph’s integration toolkit. It allows systems to be linked together without writing low level code. It allows data to be brought in through many different types of communication methods and protocols, to be filtered, transformed, have customer-defined business rules applied, and then share that data with multiple other systems again through different types of communication methods. It avoids writing code, which is both tedious, and as I well know, time consuming. It’s both flexible and reusable, and consequently very powerful. Laura Beth: Ok so let’s talk about another product- CAD Connect. How does CAD Connect make processes more efficient? David: CAD Connect provides a standard set of components for integrating with Intergraph’s computer aided dispatch system through EdgeFrontier. The integration services provide real-time notifications whenever something happens in CAD, for example when a new event is created or a unit is dispatched to an event, but also for injecting commands into CAD, such as a request to create an event by a remote system. These standard components can then be shared by multiple EdgeFrontier systems. Prior to this, integrations were nearly always point-to-point, which meant that many of the same integration tasks were performed multiple times and there was little capacity to re-use these core components. This tends to add a lot of unnecessary integration complexity and actually increases the total cost of ownership of those integrations over time. Laura Beth: David you are talking a lot about how these two products are reducing the time that it takes to implement things and also the total cost of ownership which will give you a return on your investment. Can you go over what is the ultimate goal of these two software solutions for public safety agencies? David: Ultimately the goal is to reduce the effort to build and maintain integrations and hence reduce their costs. Additionally, by reducing integration complexity, agency project managers can focus on managing and realizing the near and the long term benefits of the solution implementation. Overall, this is how we gain a greater return on the investment from the CAD system. Laura Beth: Is there anything I haven’t asked that you would like to share with our audience? David: Yes, there’s a couple of additional things. CAD Connect is just one of three standard connectors for building integrations to our public safety solutions with EdgeFrontier – the others are for our law enforcement Records Management System called inPURSUIT and for our security Command Center solutions. More connectors for EdgeFrontier will be coming in the future which promises a rich integration capability for our customers and for our future prospects. Laura Beth: David, we appreciate your insight. Obviously, this is a hot topic because who doesn’t want a return on their investment? We appreciate your time and thank you for being our guest. You can learn more about our EdgeFrontier by visiting our website at hexagonsafetyinfrastructure.com/edgefrontier.

Laura Beth: Thank you for joining us for an Intergraph SG&I podcast. In today’s podcast, we are talking with Gina Steadman who is the product owner for mobile solutions for Intergraph’s Public Safety and Security division. Gina is based in our Huntsville, Alabama office. Gina, thank you for joining us. Gina: My pleasure. Laura Beth: Gina mobile technologies remain a hot topic within the public safety sector. Mobile solutions boost safety and productivity in the field. So let’s jump right into it. Gina, what mobile solutions does Intergraph SG&I have to offer? Gina: The mobile solutions we offer are Mobile for Public Safety and Mobile Responder. Laura Beth: Let’s focus on Mobile for Public Safety first. Why is this vital product to public safety officials? Gina: All mobile products give users access into the CAD world and that’s what Mobile for Public Safety is. It’s a subset of what departments use to take calls from the public and gather information so they can respond to calls and so forth. Specifically, Mobile for Public Safety is the car based application which gives officers and firefighters in the field the ability to know where they’re going, what the situation is, the details of the call, and more. It’s critical to the support of our citizens. Laura Beth: What are some of its new features? Gina: In this release, 9.3, we have provided some updated dispatch usability enhancements. These enhancements will make it easier to access and read information because users are in a mobile environment and we want to try and make it as easy as possible for them to get the information they need without being distracted from driving and so forth. In addition to those usability enhancements we have added a person location tracking feature which gives the ability to sign in personnel to give them devices where you can see those personnel on the map and situational awareness, which is vital and becoming increasingly important as we move to a map based type of focus in these applications. Another key feature that we’ve added was map rotation. Several of our customers over the years have asked us for this feature, and we’re excited that it is a part of 9.3. So if you’re driving north, the map shows you driving forward on the map. And if you turn, the map turns with you, keeping your direction much like other mapping applications. One of the other enhancements that has been impressive and that we now support in 9.3 is the attachment capability. Users can now add attachments to the dispatch report, as well as messages. You can send a picture, for example, a photograph of a sign, and attach that to the event. Attachments can be seen in Mobile Responder, as well as at dispatch. Laura Beth: Let’s talk about Mobile Responder now. This is an application or app that can basically give you access to your computer-aided dispatch anywhere. What are its key features? Gina: Just like Mobile for Public Safety (MPS) is a subset of information used by CAD, Mobile Responder is a subset of information used by MPS. Mobile Responder is a handheld device that gives you the things that you really need on a smaller screen, which makes it user-friendly while you’re mobile. Mobile Responder provides, like Mobile for Public Safety, situational awareness and the ability to track locations, so that dispatch has an idea of where the unit might be. Person-Level tracking is support first by the unit, and then when personal need to move from Mobile for Public Safety in their vehicle to Mobile Responder on their handheld device, you can still use your officer’s location to provide them with the information they need and help keep them safe as well. Laura Beth: What are some of the latest updates to Mobile Responder that our customers are excited to see? Gina: Our customers are most excited about two features that I’ve already talked about. First, they’re excited about being able to track via a handheld device. Second, they’re excited about having the ability to see attachments in the field. Laura Beth: What devices are these solutions available on? Gina: Currently, they are available on IOS, Blackberry, Android, and most recently, Windows 8.1. Laura Beth: I know you take in a lot of customer feedback about these mobile solutions. What are they telling you, and how does the feedback that you receive drive future development? Gina: As I mentioned before, what we need to do as a company with our products and applications is to evolve with our customers. Our customers are becoming focused on situational awareness, but the trend is to be more map-focused and to be able to navigate away from the map screen and in order to complete another task. As product owner, it’s my responsibility to be the liaison between the customer and the development team, in order to make sure we’re hearing our customers, understanding their needs, and providing for our customers. Laura Beth: Is there anything I haven’t asked you that you would like to share with our audience? Gina: Yes, I’m very excited about Intergraph’s offerings for our mobile technologies. As I mentioned before we do listen to our customers. We are evolving. We’re making our products better, more efficient and capable for our customers to make real-time quick decisions based on their needs. And I’m excited for us to be able to provide that information to our customers and to continue to evolve by listing to our customers and to make our products better and what they need. And that’s the exciting part of what we do today. Laura Beth: Gina, we appreciate your time and thank you for being our guest. You can learn more about our Hexagon Safety & Infrastructure mobile solutions by visiting our website.

In this podcast, I talk to Emily Neal, systems specialist at Hexagon Safety & Infrastructure, about the best practices for implementing and using inPURSUIT records management system (RMS) for desktop and field-based reporting. Laura Beth: Thank you for joining us for an Intergraph SG&I podcast. I’m your host, Laura Beth Ezzell. In today’s podcast we are talking with Emily Neal who is a systems specialist at Intergraph. Emily is based in Columbia, Maryland. Emily, thank you for joining us. Emily: My pleasure. Laura Beth: Emily, public safety agencies everywhere are working to find the right solution to manage records. You are here to talk to us about using the right solution to do that, and how to be efficient with your records management system.  Emily, first just tell us about your role at Intergraph. Emily: I’m a systems consultant with our RMS delivery team. We manage the implementation. So, I do the implementation and training for all of our inPURSUIT products like records management, WebRMS, and field-based reporting. I’ve been doing this for about four years. Laura Beth: What solutions does Intergraph offer for records management? Emily: We have a variety of different products. With the inPURSUIT suite, particularly with inPURSUIT RMS, the records management system offers a modular-based approach to track incidents, arrests, and bookings. We offer a field-based reporting utility as well that imports the records. Laura Beth: How can an agency maximize the efficiency of using inPURSUIT RMS? Emily: The key is to get as many departments as possible using the product. When everyone is centralized in a single place and using the same software, organizations see better internal communication. We offer a centralized security system, so you can either limit information settings to records or you can grant access to different departments, so you can use these items and share them as we go through the process. Laura Beth: Let’s talk about some specific processes now. What are some best practices when using RMS in handing arrests and bookings? Emily: For inPURSUIT, best practice is knowing the module functionalities so that you can better share information. We offer a master index where you can track essential details such as names, vehicles, and locations. It becomes a place where you can have a master name like “John Smith,” and we can identify all of the different incidents or arrests that “John Smith” was involved in, and we can leverage in arrests and bookings by having officers complete our booking form first. When you finish the booking, it links to the master name. Then later on, when the officer goes to fill out an incident report with the arrest record, they’ll pull in that master name. So, you’re keeping the central offense codes, tracking prisoner property, and contact information all in one spot. Laura Beth: Ok, so let’s talk about some other areas. How can agencies improve their workflow when it comes to the management of property and evidence? Emily: With the modular-based approach, we have an evidence module and a property module. They’re both separate, but they communicate with each other within the RMS. Typically, evidence is considered things that are in hand, and property are things out of hand or lost or stolen goods. The two modules work together. We have a transfer from property to evidence feature. From our field-based reporting, we also have a search-associated property that allows our SEO users to properly grab and update the records to ensure they’re updating the right ones. When an officer goes through the transfer process, they can transfer the property item over to the evidence. Multiple groups can work in the evidence module, like detectives, crime lab personal, and evidence custodians. We offer security features that can limit the access that users have, if necessary. That means you can use our security settings to update certain fields like an authorized disposition. You can have a detective come in and say there’s a gun that’s due for disposal. We don’t need it anymore for our casework. And then, the evidence custodian comes in and approves that, setting the actual disposition for the record. And that can be all under the control of our security settings. We offer a workflow in all of these modules that will allow this type of communication to happen. Users can click on a link and go directly to the record and follow these steps to update the record. Laura Beth: What is at stake by not having a system like this in place? Emily: Users are going to overlook information or overlook reports. We offer different tools in the system that track and approve processes like our workflow system to sort of offer a sign off at each step from arrest and bookings straight through the prosecution. So, we can search and leverage those individual little fields and if you’re not tracking that then you risk not having supervisor approval at some point or not knowing that a name was involved in another case.  So, by having it in one place is very good. Laura Beth: Is there anything I haven’t asked you that you would like to share with our audience? Emily: No, I think that’s it. I think the big thing is taking in all of these RMS features and making sure that the depths of what RMS offers that our current customers are using everything in the module that they can. And then, we’re going to go forward and transfer this over to WebRMS as well. We can look forward to the same functionality there as well. Laura Beth: Ok, and just quickly, WebRMS is the cloud-deployable version of inPURSUIT RMS. Correct? Emily: Correct. Laura Beth: Emily, we appreciate your time and thank you for being our guest. You can learn more about our Hexagon Safety & Infrastructure’s public safety solutions by visiting our website.

For many of the industries and customers we serve, the cloud is quickly becoming a critical and strategic IT solution that powers multiple efficiencies across the enterprise. In this podcast, I talk with Hexagon Safety & Infrastructure’s Chief Technology Officer Kalyn Sims about why the cloud – and all of it incarnations - is becoming a so popular with our customers and within our industries.

A Mobile App That Will Unlock Your Data

In today’s podcast, I talk with Jack Williams, global business development lead for EdgeFrontier, Intergraph SG&I, about the critical importance of having an integration strategy. He also shares tips for integrating systems across different platforms. Laura Beth: Thank you for joining us for an Intergraph SG&I podcast. I’m your host, Laura Beth Ezzell. In today’s podcast, we are talking with Jack Williams who is a business developer at Intergraph. Jack is based in Fairmont, West Virginia. Jack, thank you for joining us. Jack: My pleasure. Laura Beth: Jack is here to talk with us about a strategy for integrating different systems across different platforms. Integrating different systems can be a challenge, and Jack, you know a better way for agencies to handle this process. First, just tell us about your role at Intergraph. Jack: I’m typically just called the “EdgeFrontier Guy,” just kidding. My formal title is global business development lead for EdgeFrontier products. I’ve worked with EdgeFrontier since 2004. I started out as one of the original developers. Now, my main role at Intergraph is to work internally and externally with Intergraph and Hexagon to promote and evangelize EdgeFrontier. That includes anything from training and speaking, to tech support, project support, sales support, you name it. It’s a little bit of everything, but the main idea is to evangelize EdgeFrontier. Laura Beth: Why is integration and having an integration strategy important for agencies and organizations? Jack: At the heart of most public safety agencies are the CAD and RMS systems and the ability of agencies to integrate and connect their CAD and RMS systems with outside applications, systems, and devices. Both inside and outside of the firewall, this is critical for them, as an agency, to gain a better sense of what is going on in their community. In today’s landscape, it’s critical that agencies can gather all the data points they need, take selected bits and pieces, and make a complete picture out of the summary of those parts. If they can do this, it helps them innovate, respond to change quickly, and be able to use their existing assets. For example, what about all the information silos that inevitably build up within an organization? Or what about automating some day-to-day tasks and business processes that currently costs time and money due to inefficiencies? Or, how is your agency going to handle the new technologies of the 21st century, such as the SMACT landscape? SMACT is an acronym which stands for social, mobile, analytics, the cloud, and the Internet of Things. How is your organization going to adapt to these new technologies as they come on?  These are just some examples of things that agencies to have to think about and why it’s important for them to have a plan. Integration, and having a strategy for integration, within an agency is very important, and if agencies don’t start planning ahead now, this is a cheesy line, but, they can prepare to get “SMACT” in the face moving forward. Laura Beth: It’s funny how things work together, but it’s also very true. Social, mobile, analytics, cloud, and internet of things, they’re all here and an agency has to be able to handle them. What types of problems do organizations usually face when trying to connect or integrate different interfaces? Jack: Mainly, a lack of flexibility and affordability. That’s because there’s a high cost and complexity involved in developing and maintaining interfaces. For most public safety agencies, the interfaces aren’t easy-to-use technologies that tie into their CAD or RMS systems and allow them to efficiently interface with third parties. That’s the main challenge: lack of flexibility and affordability and costs and complexity. Laura Beth: How can organizations improve this process? Jack: What I tell organizations is to consider the options available. Consider the technologies out there, and then develop a plan. To help organizations come up with a plan, I use a very simple exercise. Ask yourself where are you now and where do you want to be? Pretty simple. Then once you figure that out, come up with how do I get there? When you’re an agency and thinking where you are now, think about what connections are lacking in your current organization when it comes to helping you get the full picture? Are there existing information silos or underutilized IT assets that could be integrated into your CAD or RMS, or into your enterprise as a whole? Are there automatic notification interfaces that could immediately create a return on investment and impact in your organization? Multi-agency cooperation is a pressing a need. How easy is it for you to communicate with neighboring agencies? It’s a need that’s not going away, and it’s gaining more and more momentum. The bottom line is: do you want to be reactive or proactive? Now, where do you want to go? With the advent of SMACT and the sheer number of devices and data points that are going to come online in the next three to five years, how is your agency going to connect to these things? Where do you see yourself in the next three to five years as it pertains to connecting what typically was a very isolated world in the CAD or RMS space? Do you want to be an innovator or a reactionary? These are questions that you need to ask yourself as an agency. Laura Beth: How does a company “figure out how to get there”? What are the technology options available for Intergraph clients to integrate with other systems? Jack: Right now, the million dollar question is “How do you get there?” The answer depends on the client. Each agency is different. Each organization has different tools and technologies available to them. Fortunately, Intergraph provides its customers with the technologies and tools to help them tackle this challenge and build an integration plan. First, an agency needs to understand what options are available. You can buy a commercial off-the-shelf interface from a vendor, like Intergraph, or you can build it from scratch. With a commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) interface, it is a basic interface that does one thing, and it does that one thing well. It’s not the most flexible system in the world, but it works, and it’s specifically built to tie “System A” to “System B.” It’s usually version dependent. However, there’s not a COTS interfaces for every application that an agency will want to connect to, and it’s going to be unreasonable to think that you’re going to have a COTS interface for every potential system application or device out there. So, the second option is to build from scratch. Now, when you build from scratch, an agency typically pays someone else to build an interface for them, such as Intergraph or a third party consultant. Or an agency can build or manage its own interfaces. When it comes to building from scratch, whether it’s you as the customer or whether you’re paying Intergraph, historically there have been two behind-the-scenes methods to get this done. One is customer development, and the other is enterprise service buses, also known as ESBs. Customer development is typically impractical; you have stove pipe point-to-point interfaces that are not adaptable and reusable. Anytime something changes on either side of the equation you have to go in and rebuild the whole thing. It is a maintenance nightmare. With enterprise service buses, you get a wide range of features, loaded with a wide range of features, and you get the reusability aspects that you need. However, there are very, very high start-up costs and ongoing maintenance costs. It’s pretty much a very large all-or-nothing vision that is overkill for most integration. What agencies really want and really need are affordability and flexibility when it comes to interfacing. Agencies need an integration solution in the middle of these two approaches that enables rapid, affordable interfaces tailored exactly to their needs. The good news is there is with EdgeFrontier. Laura Beth: So what is EdgeFrontier? Jack: EdgeFrontier is a do-it-yourself general-purpose integration platform for IT professionals and developers, which enables affordable interfaces tailored exactly to the needs of an organization. It’s very lightweight, yet powerful for integrating information flows, business processes, and sharing data. It’s flexible too, EdgeFrontier isn’t an all or nothing vision, so it can be deployed as a stand along integration approach or along side other integration approaches and middleware, such as enterprise service buses. Most importantly for Intergraph customers is that we have pre-built interfaces to our core products at Intergraph and Hexagon. For example, I/CAD, WebRMS, I/Security, and GeoMedia all have pre-built interfaces and the power of EdgeFrontier that allow us and our customers to build organization-specific features around our core products, ultimately making our core products work better for us and our clients. That’s what EdgeFrontier is, and some of the impact it can have for an agency. Laura Beth: From a customer perspective, where does EdgeFrontier fit in the larger Intergraph Integration Framework? Jack: That’s a good question, and something a customer needs to consider as they’re developing an integration strategy. As an Intergraph customer, I think that you get the best of both worlds. We have several commercial off-the-shelf interfaces for common systems already that can be leveraged. These are solid tested interfaces and ready-to-go common systems that you can interface within the public safety universe. They are solid, typically do one thing, and do it well. You have those for existing products, but in the future there will be more interfaces developed. These will come up more and more, especially in the next three to five years. EdgeFrontier handles all of our new stuff. Overtime, the commercial off-the-shelf interfaces will be replaced by EdgeFrontier configurations; however, right now on we have commercial off-the-shelf integration solutions that work. If it works, we’re not going to replace it at this moment in time. What we’re doing is using EdgeFrontier to tackle anything new, and anything that we currently don’t support, or our clients don’t support. Essentially, we have commercial off-the-shelf systems that are very common, and then we have EdgeFrontier to handle everything else. With that approach, we feel like we provide our clients with a good integration framework to tackle their interfacing needs. Laura Beth: Does EdgeFrontier give organizations the ability to manage their interfaces or build a better strategy around this process? Jack: Yes it does. And not only do we use EdgeFrontier internally to build interfaces for our clients and to make our core products better, we also provide EdgeFrontier to our customers to allow them to build and manage their own interfaces for their Intergraph core products. It’s a very unique concept that separates Intergraph from its competitors in the market place. This allows an organization to take ownership, so they’re empowered. And it allows them to make their core products, their core solutions, and work better for them because they can tailor specific features around the core products that are specific to their agency. In addition, EdgeFrontier can work alongside other approaches to make a “hybrid solution,” so like EdgeFrontier working with a service bus. EdgeFrontier can be plugged in to help create new integration strategy, or help you build a better integration strategy by plugging the holes in some of the other approaches you can take. EdgeFrontier gives you a lot of flexibility when it comes to managing and building a better strategy for integration. Laura Beth: You’ve mentioned some benefits, but what’s the ultimate benefit here? Is it time, money? Jack: Money. More specifically, lowering the total cost of ownership of interfaces and enabling new innovations. That’s really what it’s all about. Interfaces are risky. They cost a lot of money to maintain and to enhance as things change. The benefit is found in lowering the curve of the total cost of ownership for interfaces. That’s the most important benefit for a customer. The second, I would say, is it enables innovation. It helps you to be a leader in innovating and creating strategic partnerships. Those are the two ultimate benefits. It also optionally, if a client so desires, empowers them because they can now take EdgeFrontier and build and manage their own interfaces. So, that’s another benefit; in the fact that we put the keys in your hands and let you use EdgeFrontier to tackle your own problems. It provides a level of empowerment. Laura Beth: Jack you have shared a lot, but is there anything I haven’t asked you about or some tips that you would like to share with our audience? Jack: I think I’ve thrown a lot at you in the short time that we have. But, the main take away I would want agencies to walk away with is the need to start thinking about the importance of integration and creating an integration strategy. Also, I challenge you to think about the importance of integration, not only for your core Intergraph products, but for integration as a whole, outside of your Intergraph core solutions. Just some general thoughts I’d recommend that an agency maybe do some of the things that I’m about to mention to help you start thinking about your integration strategy and putting together a plan: Start looking at integration as an on-ramp to innovation as opposed to a roadblock. Take inventory of your old, current, and new interfacing opportunities. Think how you could make your Intergraph core product work better for you Determine which interfaces would provide the most impact. Tackle the small interfaces first that can show immediate ROI (try to think of five). Determine do you want to outsource or build your own. Do you want to go with a Hybrid? Do you need consulting services? A couple of other things to consider in the landscape of integration is, one, understand that things will change, and, two, in the world of interfacing, you’re in the middle between two things and those two things will change. So, understand that things will change, and you need to be able to respond to that as quickly as possible. Always have a good test environment. I know it’s kind of technical jargon here but it really helps to build quality interfaces that meet organization specific requirements. Also, when you are writing requirements or working together with your vendor, like Intergraph, to define what an interface should look like and how it should function, focus on good laymen’s terms requirements. Those are just some ideas that I think agencies should start thinking about and hopefully they’d walk away with some motivation to do so. You know, as the author Alan Lakein famously said, “Failing to plan is planning to fail.” Laura Beth: Very well said and these are some great points. We hope that many will go through them and start integrating a strategy for their interfaces. Jack, we appreciate your time and thank you for being our guest. You can learn more about EdgeFrontier solutions by visiting our website at intergraph.com/edgefrontier.

In this podcast, I talk with Eric Charette, executive technical manager for Intergraph’s utilities and communications division, about how utility providers can turn severe weather and other unplanned events into planned activities and preparedness. Laura Beth: Thank you for joining us for an Intergraph SG&I podcast. I’m your host Laura Beth Ezzell. In today’s podcast, we’re talking with Eric Charette who is based in our Huntsville, Alabama office. Eric, thank you for joining us. Eric: My pleasure. Laura Beth: Eric, it’s no secret that storms can cause chaos, especially for those working in the utility industry. There is help though and you are here to discuss how utility agencies can transform the chaos of storms into planned activities. Eric, first let’s just talk about what are some of the challenges utility companies face when storms roll through. Eric: Major storms are very complex. The fact that storms don’t happen every day is a challenge. Major storm response involves deploying large teams of people that often have other areas of primary responsibility. The utility provider is challenged by keeping the skills of those employees sharp and ready for activation at any time. Then, depending on the magnitude of the storm, a small service center that normally staffs just a few people can turn into a major epicenter of activity with contractors, mutual assistance crews, and other resources that are needed to manage that storm. The management of those resources is a tremendous effort in and of itself – with everything from arranging meals and lodging to even clean clothes for some of the first responders. There are a lot of challenges beyond that, but these are just a few to mention. Laura Beth: The process of handling storms can vary from region, state or even a district of the same utility. Why is that? Eric: From my experience with storm management, when I worked at Wisconsin Public Service, I don’t think that I ever managed two storms that were alike. It’s often the characteristics of the storm that make them all unique. This might be the time of day that they hit. It might be the day of week or even the portion of service territory that they impact.  While the storm may vary, what needs to be consistent is how they are managed. Having proper documented information for storm response procedures that are routinely tested really helps to enable a utility provider to be prepared for the unique caveats that a particular storm might bring. Ensuring proper assessment is completed helps to prioritize storm areas and develop an overall strategy for storm restoration. Laura Beth: What technology is available to help create a smarter workflow in handling storm outages? Eric: Well, that’s a good question. The majority of utilities are still using manual processes for assessment. This might in paper forms or phone conversations. And it’s unlikely that the data collected is ever entered into any of the systems that are needed for dispatch or restoration. Technology is now widely available to help automate and streamline that entire process. It starts with the fact that almost every field worker carries a smart phone or has access to a tablet. Now, web-based solutions can help extend the visibility of storm management out to the entire enterprise, and those components are commonplace along with the addition of web services that can supply information from supporting systems like outage management or GIS. Though it’s possible to completely remove all of the paper from that process. And one of the ways to do that is to use Intergraph’s damage assessment software package. Laura Beth: What do you consider some of the key features of this damage assessment tool that you can describe for us? Eric: Intergraph’s damage assessment solution has several components that originate in the storm room with the planning or work assignment. And then that extends out to the field for data collection, and then circles back for analysis and systems integration. Work assignment includes assigning assessment areas to field crews so that those field crews can be tracked as long as the progress is being made by their assessment. Data collection is done on a tablet or smartphone based solution to help document the specifics of the damage that they find in the field. Data processing and systems integration are the server side intelligence that help make decisions on what to do with that data. Lastly, the visualization and analysis are web-based solutions for display of the information that’s collected in the field like damage reports along with outage and crew locations. And then the tools and reports to help determine the extent of the damage, the restoration strategy, and the overall duration that’s anticipated for storm restoration. Laura Beth: Why is this solution key in today’s utility and communications needs and requirements? Eric: Today’s utility customer expects access to real-time outage information and restoration times via things like online portals, social media, email, and text-based messaging. They’re really making critical decisions based on this information. Utilities are often leery about providing customers with that in-depth restoration time information for the risk of providing inaccurate restoration times that may cause additional customer frustration when compared with not communicating at all. It has only been until recently that utility providers have begun to place equal emphasis on the customer outage experience as they have traditionally placed on safe restoration processes. So, now utility providers can start to meet the demands for customer information by implementing solutions that support improving that customer outage experience. Things like damage assessment, or advanced restoration time, which leverages real-time information, and then, ultimately, the communication of that outage information in the form of a notification. By better understanding the damage to the grid, a utility can more accurately update those restoration times and communicate the information out to customers based on their preference management selections. Laura Beth: What risk do companies incur by not having a solution like this? Eric: Honestly, utilities have so much to gain by automating the damage assessment process. The automation of a predominately paper-driven process can help ensure that proper staffing levels are initialized and maintained. It also provides real-time feedback on the physical damage collected by the damage assessors, which are leveraging widely-used devices for data collection. The web dashboards enable storm managers in the war room to track the progress being made in damage assessment. And then with the integration with outage systems help to inform the dispatcher on the extent of the damage to be repaired prior to the restoration. It’s almost as if utilities cannot afford to not move forward by automating this process. Laura Beth: Eric, is there anything I haven’t asked that you would like to share with our audience? Eric: We are very excited about being on the forefront of aiding utilities as they work toward improving the overall customer outage experience. Being responsive to the industry and offering a damage assessment solution that can be implemented quickly is very timely. Developing a solution that can be implemented at any utility, not just those who already own Intergraph technology, allows us to offer a high value solution to the entire industry. Laura Beth: Eric, this is great information and we appreciate all your insight today and telling us about damage assessment. We hope many utilities out there will take it in and start using this valuable tool. We appreciate your time and thank you for being our guest as well. You can learn more about our Intergraph SG&I Utilities and Communications solutions by visiting our website.

Laura Beth: Thank you for joining us for an Intergraph SG&I podcast. In today’s podcast, we are talking with Karen Ball who is the Global Product Manager for our Intergraph Utilities and Communications division. Karen is based in our Huntsville, Alabama office. Karen, thank you for joining us. Karen: My pleasure. It’s great to be talking to you. Laura Beth: Karen, Intergraph’s G/technology software continues to advance its capabilities. You are here to give us some insight into some of the recent and planned enhancements and a vision for the product suite’s future. First just tell us about your role at Intergraph SG&I? Karen: As Product Manager for the G/Technology products I serve our customers by listening to their needs and by watching industry trends to plan future product releases.  I also support our customers and our Intergraph implementation teams by sharing what’s new with our products. Laura Beth: Can you give us a brief description of what Intergraph’s G/Technology software is? Karen: G/Technology is a suite of products that utilities and telecommunications companies use to design, document, analyze and distribute information about their connected facility network.  The suite is used in support of electric power networks, gas networks, water networks, steam, telecommunications, fiber, copper, for coax cable so it’s a wide variety of uses. Laura Beth: Ok, it definitely sounds like it. So how important is GIS technology to Intergraph’s utility and communications customers? Karen:  GIS capabilities are of course crucial. Our companies that we serve need to know where their equipment is. Need to know where to send their crews. They also need to know for reasons such as tax reporting, to know where their assets lye. So spatial analysis and GIS abilities are very important. But G/Technology does more than just provide GIS needs. G/ Technology supports the work processes, sending information out to their crews. Supporting the design process as they plan new extensions to their network. It also supports analysis capabilities and so not only do we have the location of those assets but how they’re connected together to represent how the electricity actually flows through the network or how signals for a telecommunications network flow. Also how the network is supported, what poles and structures. And this is all integrated not only for mapping but to support their field crews, to support contractors and even to provide information to their customers. For example, when you call a call before you dig to see if there’s equipment for a utility in your yard on in your property, that’s supported by information that maybe maintained with the G/Technology products. Laura Beth: What are some of the recent updates to G/Technology? Karen: I’m excited to talk about the release that we just made public. We just released G/Technology 10.2.1. G/Technology has been fielded for over ten years now so it’s pretty rich product suite already.  So we’ve given the users more capability for visualizing the results of their analysis. So for example if they’ve traced the network, they can change the color, they can change the line pattern so that that is more useful as they go about the rest of their business with our products. We’ve also added some capabilities that help administrators of the product. As a GIS system, the map and how that looks is very important but sometimes tedious to configure and set up for all the users and sometimes our installations have hundreds sometimes even thousands of users. So we’ve introduced a new administrative tool called legend builder that helps their administrative staff configure and design how those maps will look for their users. Laura Beth: Why were these updates made? Was it from customer feedback at all? Karen: In both of those examples that I’ve given it was directly based from customer feedback. So they’ve been using our analysis capabilities before but wanted a richer experience and so we extended that. The legend builder tool was based on customer feedback. They liked the capability of configuring the system and making it suite their particular needs but they found that it was time consuming to do so and in that case we worked with several customers as stakeholders as we went through the design process and implemented so they got to see early versions and provide feedback to use which was very help. Laura Beth: What is the future vision for G/Technology? Karen: Well as I said G/Technology has already been fielded for over a decade. It’s very rich but there are places where we can make it more efficient for the end users so they can be more productive and get more work done. There are also lots of opportunities for integrating with other systems so I mentioned the call before you dig type systems but the data that’s maintained in G/Technology supports operational systems within companies so to send out with repair crews or to send out on construction jobs and the real time integration of that and having that better representation as soon as something is constructed or energized or put into service, those are some areas where we will be making enhancements. And also being able to embed analysis around not GIS capabilities but more engineering calculations for electric networks or telecommunications engineering analysis. Embedding that directly accessible from the G/Technology products is an area where we plan for enhancements. Laura Beth: Can you tell us about the success that some of Intergraph’s customers are seeing from using the G/Technology suite? Karen: Sure, there are lots of examples. I’ll highlight a couple. A couple that come to mind are Virgin Media and Enersource. Virgin Media is a telecommunications provider in the United Kingdom and they’re using G/Technology in combination with and add-on product called Fiber Optic Works to expand their network. They’ve planning to expand their network and provide fiber to homes to four million homes over the next few years. So they have a lot of activity. They need to do that quickly. They need a place to keep records of all those changes and also to support making those changes before the construction actually happens and so that’s one example of how a customer is utilizing G/Technology to support their business and to be more profitable. Another example is Enersource. Enersource is a power utility in Cananda and one benefit that they have from using G/Technology is resilience in their operational system. So their control center provides a command and control for their dispatchers to send crews out and especially in storm situations that’s critical to the business of that utility. And G/Technology provides the maps for that. Provides the representation of how that network is connected to be able to predict where to send crews. So Enersource had a goal of being able to move their command and control center if needed, if it were hit by a storm or something. But their challenge was that much of the data that they relied on was still  hand written or was not up to date. So with G/Technology they can maintain the representation of that system as it’s built and their network in a digital form in a single source and be able to then deploy that to an alternate command center within an hour I think. I know someone from Enersource said it takes a half hour to drive to the other location so being set-up and running within an hour with digital maps that are based on G/Technology is really a benefit for them. Enersource achieves resilience for their operator control center by having up-to-date representation of the as-constructed, as-energized network maintained in G/Technology, allowing them to easily move this operational Laura Beth: Thank-you for those two examples and we appreciate your time and thank you for being our guest. You can learn more about our Intergraph SG&I Utilities and Communications solutions by visiting our website at Intergraph.com/utilities.

At Intergraph, we believe in letting the voice of our customers’ guide the products and solutions we develop. Did you know that as an Intergraph customer, you can let your voice be heard about the products you use? All you have to do is join a product user group. Being a part of user groups gives  you - and product owners – an open line of communication to Intergraph’s product and solution development teams, helping us improve and fine tune  our product lines to your needs. In this podcast, we talk to Len Socha, director of technical services at Wisconsin Public Service and the President of Intergraph’s InService Customer Organization User Group (I2CO) Listen to hear how I2CO is making a huge impact on Intergraph’s InService software. Podcast Script: Laura Beth: Thank you for joining us for an Intergraph SG&I podcast. In today’s podcast, we are talking with Len Socha who is the Director of Technical Services at Wisconsin Public Service in the US. Len is also the President of the InService Customer Organization User Group also known as I2CO. Len, thank-you for joining us. Len: My pleasure. Laura Beth: Today we are talking with Len about the importance of the I2CO user group. Now this group exists to provide communication and collaboration with InService users and Intergraph. Len, let’s get right to it. Tell me how the I2CO group was formed and for what purpose? Len: The group was formed by several utilities who really wanted to build a strong working relationship with Intergraph in hopes in providing future product direction and development.  Really the purpose is to provide Intergraph with feedback on existing and future product direction, and also work in partnership with Intergraph to enhance the product for both existing as well as new customers that would be coming on board. Laura Beth: So why is a group like this important?  Len: It is about collaboration. Really amongst the customers as well as Intergraph. And really what we want to do is provide a consistent message from the customers to Intergraph on what we feel are the hottest topics as well as the future product direction to make it better for all of us. Laura Beth: What do you find are the greatest benefits you’ve received from being a part of the I2CO user group?   Len: The best value that I get from this group is really the opportunity to work with other utilities. It’s about working with the other people and other utilities that use the same products that we use. And it’s also about how are they using them uniquely and a little bit different. It’s really about learning from one another. Laura Beth: Len can you give examples of others who have benefited from being in the group? Len: The group really consists of both business and I.T. members. There is value I think for both groups.  It’s about connecting people with the same people who do the same job and the same functions. We have utilities not just from the United States, so it’s pretty cool to work with people from throughout the world and really get the opportunity to interact with them. Laura Beth: I understand every year there is an annual face-to-face meeting at Hexagon’s international conference. What goes on at this meeting? Len: This meeting gives us the opportunity to catch up with each other, meet face-to-face, where typically we’re just doing teleconferences. It gives us the opportunity for more discussion, idea sharing, collaboration which usually come out more in a face-to-face opportunity and face-to-face setting.  We also meet with Intergraph executives to discuss our concerns and allow them to hear about what we feel, which I think is a pretty unique opportunity to meet with executives from the company. And then lastly, what we do is we build in time for demonstrating new products and new solutions, which sometimes may have been built for a unique or a special customer, but could be utilized by others. So again, the opportunity to share with the group. Laura Beth: How can someone join this group and participate in that annual meeting? Len: Customers can join the group as long as they are an existing InService customer or a customer that has an order placed to be a customer. And the best way to do that is by contacting somebody at Intergraph, and they’ll provide contact information to get a hold of one of the I2CO board members for the registration. There will also be a link when the customers register for the HxGN LIVE conference this year, and they can sign up for the I2CO meeting at that time. We also have several other yearly web conferences, where we discuss topics as well as product direction. And customers are always encouraged to join them as well. Laura Beth:What results have you seen made to the InService product line from comments, suggestions or discussions that have been raised from I2CO former meetings? Len: What we do is we survey our customers, every customer, every couple of years. What we do is we build a list of enhancements that the customers want to see. A couple years ago, I think we had about 10 enhancements on the list. And today, all but a couple have been completed.  Some of these enhancements include things like improved trouble analysis performance, a complete outage reconciliation module, switch planning enhancements, and several others just to name a few. Laura Beth: Is there anything I haven’t asked you that you would like to share with our audience? Len: I would encourage all InService OMS customers to attend and join the Hexagon LIVE meeting, the I2CO meeting at Hexagon LIVE as well as the regularly scheduled web conferences that we have. I just feel like there’s a lot of value in working directly with the peers who are basically using the same functions and the same software on a daily basis. And it just allows us all to collaborate and work together. Laura Beth: Len, we appreciate your time and thank you for being our guest. You can learn more about Intergraph SG&I solutions by visiting our website at Intergraph.com/sgi. Not an I2CO member?  Membership is free and open to any Intergraph utility customer who has implemented Intergraph’s InService product or placed an order.  If you would like to become a member, please email Intergraph's Jennifer Garmon at jennifer.garmon@intergraph.com for the membership bylaws and registration information.  Do you want to hear more of Intergraph SG&I’s podcasts? You can! Just subscribe to our podcast channel either through your smartphone podcast app or through the iTunes Store.  Subscribe today.

Laura Beth: Thank you for joining us for an Intergraph SG&I podcast. In today’s podcast, we are talking with Rod Martinsen who is a Managing Consultant with Intergraph SG&I. Rod is based in our Calgary, Canada office. Rod, thank-you for joining us. Rod: Your Welcome Laura Beth: Today we are talking with Rod about the Public Safety sector in Canada. While that may seem like a broad topic, we’re going to focus on how public safety and security may differ in Canada from the rest of the world.  What tactics do they use that others could learn from and what technology are they using to help protect Canadian citizens. Laura Beth: Rod, first just tell us about yourself and what you do at Intergraph? Rod: Well as you stated I’m a Managing Consultant here in Calgary in the Calgary office and I’ve been with Intergraph now for 29 years. Twenty-six of those have been in the Public Safety division. So working with various customers throughout Canada and the United States in the public safety world. What we do here in Canada is essentially a broad gambit of things where we do the design of the system when we first talk with the clients help load up their data help do the configuration for the various forms and then take the systems into live operations. Laura Beth: And how have you seen the public safety world change over the years? You said you’ve been kind of working in public safety for 26 years. Rod: Yeah so the big changes I see from an Intergraph perspective is that we moved our software out of a UNIX platform into Windows, which was an exciting time for those of us who were going through that one. But also to see the changes that we see at our customer sites. I was onsite at a police service for almost five years. When we started there they had an open door policy. You could walk in. Any person off the street could meet with a police officer. Now when you walk in you are greeted by a security officer. You are scanned before you even get a chance to get to the front desk to talk with people. So from the perspective of what happened on September 11th has really impacted how the police interact with people and how we get to interact with them. Laura Beth: So how is public safety handled differently in Canada than others parts of the world? Rod: The main difference that I observe and see with Canada is generally our customers are a stand-a-lone customer. So I don’t have a system that has a lot of multi-agencies. Something I saw when I was working down in the states at a various number of sites is that there would be police, fire and ems on our system. Here in Canada is tends to be police. We do have some that are fire and ems together but generally the police are off on their own for their security requirements that they have and to keep the data separate and to make sure everything that they encounter is going to stay secure. Laura Beth: And you’ve kind of made the point how you kind of work within the CAD system and building the CAD system that each different police or fire needs and we kind of have that all over the world. And then we talk about how you might not have multi-agencies as much in Canada but we can still tailor the software to be used by those agencies and we’ll talk about that a little bit later. So how do you feel public safety practices can differ so much from one region of the world to another? Rod: It all comes down to what does the agency need and what are their policies. It’s different as I work here in Canada as I go from one police agency to the next their policing policies, their ideas of how they can best meet the needs of their citizens are very different. Same with fire department as you go in and you’re looking at the fire department and we have some people who have to worry about large industrial complexes others are just a small rural fire department looking after grass fires, home fires nothing really major in what you would encounter in the city on some of these big industrial complexes. So the big difference is what are the local needs and how can we meet those needs and I had the opportunity to be in Europe this year and I was talking to another Intergraph person there and he was telling me in his city, essentially the same size as Calgary where I’m at is that they only have one or two patrol cars per every division every night where here in Calgary we will put far more than that, far more police on the streets. So very very different. Laura Beth: So let’s talk about technology though. Intergraph has customers all over the world, like you were just stating that all handle public safety differently. There’s no one written book on how it should be done but they all are able to use our technology and customize it to their needs. The biggest being our computer-aided dispatch software. How does this work? Rod: Well what Intergraph has provided to our customer is a great interface that allows people like myself and my co-workers to go in and design the software to meet what their workflow requirements are. To capture the data that they feel is important. And as I said before each police agency has different workflows different ideas of what they want to do. Some agencies want to capture data saying that this is going to be a part of my strategic policing for the month. And if I encounter any kind of event I want to tag that. Other police agencies are not interested in doing that on the front end. So we at Intergraph provide very flexible software that we can use to help people make it fit what is in their workflow need. Even to the mobile computing in the car. A great opportunity for our police agencies to come in and say this is how we do our policing. The fire guys come in and say we don’t need to have all of that functionality. We would like to keep it down to a more simpler interface and we have that opportunity to design and change the interface to match what they need. Laura Beth: Now there are also solutions that are used at a regional level. Tell me about any technologies used in Canada that help meet public safety needs there. Rod:Well we have a couple of ways we do that here in Canada. We have some custom code that was developed here to help us transfer patients and that has been extrapolated to say how do the police transfer prisoners taking them from one place to the next and keeping track of them. But one of our new ideas that we have or our new software is this Intergraph Planning and Response. Otherwise known as IPR and IPR gives our client the ability to take preplanned events such as here in Calgary we have the Calgary Stampede. So we could take our IPR software. We could put all the planning that’s required for the many police resources for fire resources for ems resources that are needed for that parade to actually take place. And we have other types of festivals and parades that are the same thing. So what this software allows us to do is take it and do some very thorough planning. Do some desktop exercises with that and then give the agency the ability to exercise the plans in making sure that everything that should be done, should be covered. And you do all this thought process and it allows you to do some ad hoc tasking to say oh we forgot this part or this is new. And you can put that into the plan. So IPR essentially wants to take it away from the emergency dispatch people because they’re extended type of events with multiple resources and you handle them in a different fashion. Not always going to be an emergency operation that would go into the traditional EOC or emergency operations centers but still something that needs to have some kind of command or somebody whose in control ensuring that everything is happening properly and in a timely fashion. Laura Beth: Why is this important to have technology solutions built this way? Rod: Well it’s to allow our customers to best meet the needs of their clients if you will or the citizens of whom they serve. It’s that our software helps them to be more efficient. It helps them to be able to get to the data that they need to make the proper decisions that they are faced with every day that they are out on the street. Whether it’s police, fire or ems they get that ability. And our dispatch staff that use these can hook into various interfaces and allow them to get to better and more complete data so that they can be much more efficient in what they’re doing. Laura Beth: Now Rod I asked you earlier how you’ve seen the public safety world change over the years, but now where do you see it going, particularly in relation to Canada? Rod: What our clients are telling us is that we need better integration to external systems whether that’s an alerting system, whether that’s a records management system. Often times as major events come on they have to go and do some work in this system and then go and work in this system and they want to have that better integration. And Intergraph is working very hard to do that to bring that integration closer together with products like our EdgeFrontier which can be used to tie a lot of different external systems all into one. So the users enter the data once. The data it pulls through to the other systems. They can query other systems. We can do automated responses to automated checks. We can go look at a weather channel or cameras that are on roadways. Whatever the dispatcher or the command staff need to see. Laura Beth: Well Rod, we appreciate your time and thank you for being our guest. You can learn more about Intergraph SG&I Public Safety solutions by visiting our website at Intergraph.com/publicsafety

Podcast: Capturing the User Experience Has anyone ever tried to understand your job? Have they tried to get the real picture of what a day in your world is really like? It’s known as capturing the user experience. In this podcast, I talk with Intergraph’s Amy Hawkins who is leading a team that does just that. Listen in to hear how understanding your job is changing lives, companies and future technology. Podcast: Laura Beth: Thank you for joining us for an Intergraph SG&I podcast. In today’s podcast, we are talking with Amy Hawkins who is the User Experience Manager with Intergraph SG&I. Amy is based in our Huntsville, Alabama office. Amy, thank you for joining us. Amy: Glad to be here. Laura Beth: Today we are talking with Amy about just what is the user experience. Amy and her team are working to make sure that products developed are meeting users needs. They’re taking the time to sit down with real users of Intergraph’s solutions and get their feedback first hand. This feedback could then dictate the future development of an Intergraph solution. Amy, first just tell us about yourself and what you do? Amy:  I manage the user experience team, a group of visual and interaction designers and user researchers that are part of the product development center in the Security, Government and Infrastructure division at Intergraph.  I did my undergraduate work in communications and got a master’s degree in Information Science with a concentration in human computer interaction. I’ve been working in user experience and user technology for little over twenty years. About half of that time I worked in the defense industry and the other half was in commercial software most notably about nine years at IBM. Laura Beth: And so what do you do at Intergraph. Amy: I actually lead the team that helps define user experience for our products.  Laura Beth: Sowhat does the user experience mean? Amy: That’s a fun question. I think lots of people in the field have a different opinion about it. And there’s a fair bit of variation. But one of the definitions I like best for user experience comes from a group called Nielsen Norman Group which is a very highly well respected user research firm. They describe user experience as all of the aspects of an end users interaction with the company, its services and its products. I really like that broad definition because it gives you a lot of latitude. Right now my team is focused mainly on the software solutions that our division provides. We conduct research with users to understand their needs. We conduct technology research and work with our innovations team to design and develop the best possible user experience. So this means we work on much more than just the user interface. I think that’s one of the common misconceptions in user experience is that it’s really just another name for user interface and that is really not the case.  We support what Jesse James Garrett, one of the luminaires in our field, calls the five planes of user experience. The short story of that is that we work across product life cycles from strategy, before products or features are even defined, all the way to the surface, which includes, not just the visual design, but also the interaction design, and things like haptics, audio and so on. Laura Beth: How is your team working to capture the true user experience? Amy: So generally we use standard user research methods. A lot of which are grouped under the term contextual inquiry. This means we visit locations where people are doing their jobs to observe their workflows, what works for them and what doesn’t work for them in the environment where they are actually doing their jobs. We also conduct interviews and surveys to understand other factors forming their mental models. We recently did observations and interviews with about 15 911-call takers and dispatchers about 47 ride a longs with police, firefighters and ems personal. In one of those events we also interviewed ten other personnel at sights using other Intergraph products doing IT tasks, records management and crime analysis. Now note that I said what we generally do is use standard methods because as technologies are evolving we want to take advantage of those technologies. There certainly are opportunities for us to create new research methods. We’re partnering with some research one universities to do exactly that.    Laura Beth: What can be done with this data? How will it be used? Amy: Uh it’s important to understand this type of data, what I just described to you there is what we call formative in nature.  So we use it to help us define user models that inform our software designs and user models I mean things like journey maps, scenarios that describe a group of workflows, workflow diagrams and personas or user profiles. And then we use these to drive . . . sometimes product strategy but sometimes it’s interaction design, wireframes, prototypes all the different pieces that come together to help make optimally useful product.  Now then, on the other end of the process, we do evaluate the usability of the built software using those scenarios that we developed at the beginning and those personas and profiles. This gets more complicated as we build more mobile ecosystems and we’re not looking specifically at individual products. But this methodology also helps us make sure that if users need information in real time that they’re getting it in real-time. And it also helps drive integration across products.  Laura Beth: What kind of reception have you gotten from being onsite with the users? Amy: I think my team would stand beside me and say it’s been overwhelmingly positive. I think the longest that anyone has been on the UX team is about two years so it’s a comparatively new thing we’re doing here. But the response has been really exceptional. I think one person I interviewed said in all of her career she couldn’t remember a software company ever sending anyone out to talk to her and understand her job. She was really excited to hear that Intergraph SG&I was making this kind of investment.    Laura Beth: So why is this important? Amy: In security, public safety, and utilities and communications good user experience in our products can save lives, not to mention money. Good user experience removes impedances from people’s workloads. So it increases their ability to be fully engaged in their tasks. Which leads not only to more productivity but to a generally happier work place. Specifically on the utilities and communications side it can be the difference between someone driving out into the field for a couple of hours and going with all the information they needed or having to go out and come back, and that’s not just money on the utilities side but also how long it takes before people get their power back or before things can move forward for their end users.  It’s good for our customer end users and then it also moves on down the line to their customers. Laura Beth: How important of a role do you feel capturing the user experience should and will play in the future of creating products and solutions? Amy: I think it is just absolutely huge. Our customers have difficult, stressful and important jobs and we need to make their jobs as easy as we can. As we do that we need to make sure that we aren’t overloading them with information or leaving them making decisions with less information than they should have. Their safety and the safety of others depends on us doing a good job on user experience. And as mobile technologies continue to grow and our customers use more of these devices it’s really up to us to help them be more effective. Speaking just from a business perspective, companies only have so many dollars to spend and user researchers help make sure those dollars are wisely spent.  I think there’s an IBM study that says for every dollar a software company spends on design research they net between ten and a hundred dollars. That just makes good business sense for everybody.    Laura Beth: Is there anything I haven’t asked you that you would like to share with our audience? Amy: The only thing I think I would add is that I’ve found Intergraph SG&I to be a place that is really committed to user-centered design. Lots of people talk about UX and how important it is, but in a lot of cases what they really mean is they work at designing nice user interfaces. And you see this especially in the web field and the mobile applications. But great user experiences are way more than just a nice user interface.  SG&I has hired a team of professionals some of whom have advanced degrees in the appropriate areas to do the best job that we can on the user experience. We’ve also established relationships with institutions that are leading research and human computer interaction, wearable devices, sensors, and unmanned systems as well as even brain science to help us better understand how our systems are performing and supporting users. That’s a lot more than words. That’s a real commitment. Laura Beth: Amy, we appreciate your time and thank you for being our guest. You can learn more about Intergraph SG&I solutions by visiting our website at Intergraph.com/sgi.

In this podcast, I talk with Intergraph’s Jennifer Garmon about how our customers are working to manage the requirements of tomorrow’s energy market. She shares with us how one Intergraph customer is using our technology and geospatial data to help make smarter decisions that will help sustain our future energy needs. Laura Beth: Thank you for joining us for an Intergraph SG&I podcast. In today’s podcast, we are talking with Jennifer Garmon, who is the product manager for InService – Intergraph’s suite of outage management products. Jennifer is based in our Huntsville, Alabama office. Jennifer, thank you for joining us. Jennifer recently attended a Geo-Energy summit and education forum in Huntsville, Alabama. The summit gathered around 400 professionals from corporations and government agencies that demonstrate emerging technologies to sustain future energy needs. Laura Beth: Jennifer, first just tell us about this summit? Jennifer: Hi Laura Beth – the summit was held at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center here in Huntsville, and the focus of the summit was on geospatial and smart energy solutions.  Laura Beth: Why did you choose to attend? Jennifer: We chose to attend because Intergraph solutions play a key role in those domains, and we wanted to share with the other attendees how our solutions have helped customers improve the operation of their Smart GRID.  Also, it is always important for us not only to share our successes, but also to learn from other industry experts and customers. Laura Beth: So what role does Intergraph play in the discussion of sustaining our future energy needs? Jennifer: Well there are many facets to this challenge, and Intergraph is working on its products to integrate concepts such as voltage reduction, distributed renewable generation, and demand response programs supporting the sustainability of our future energy needs. This integration into our products will enable our customers to efficiently manage the requirements of these programs and therefore tomorrow’s energy market. Laura Beth: So you presented at this summit, correct? What did you present? Jennifer: I discussed how one of our customers, Oncor Electric, has integrated smart meters into its distribution management system, which is built on Intergraph’s InService outage management and enterprise GIS solutions.   And by using Intergraph’s consolidated user environment, Oncor can manage outages. They can manage their mobile workforce, view and interact with the real time operational network, their SCADA devices, and alarming and their smart meters.  All of these things are based on the network model driven by our enterprise GIS.  My presentation focused primarily on how they’re using smart meter information with outage management integrated through a meter data management system, which we call MDM, and advanced metering infrastructure, which is AMI. Several speakers emphasized how important it is to use a standard interface for exchanging data between systems in their presentations.  And this is why our integration with AMI is using a CIM-standard data exchange, and our entire system is based on integration with GIS, whether it is Intergraph’s G/Technology software or another product. Also during my presentation, I was given an opportunity to talk about the benefits Oncor has actually seen with this integration. Their smart meters automatically send last-gasp messages indicating there’s a power outage. So because of that, they have been able to resolve 25 percent of their power outages without ever even receiving a call from a customer.  And by using predictive pinging of meters, they are able to respond to outages much faster because they don’t have to rely solely on customer calls to learn about their outages. They also have talked about how they’ve saved a million dollars a year just by pinging meters to verify that the meter in fact does not have power before they send a crew out.  They’ve also found that they are able to resolve 20 percent of their outages this way.  Oncor also now sees fewer repeat visits by their crew making sure that the power is fully restored by using what we call automatic restoration verification. And that uses intelligent pinging of smart meters. So they’ve seen a lot of benefits from this integration with AMI and the smart grid – and of course, the key ingredient in making sure this is all possible is the quality of the GIS data, which was also a big focus of the conference. Laura Beth: Right, and the need and use of geospatial technology was a key topic at this summit. How big of a role does geospatial technology play? Jennifer: It plays a huge role. The use of the GIS data helps the engineers better understand the problem areas, and the quality of this data gives them better confidence about the decisions they’re making in the control room without having to actually go into the field to verify what they’re seeing.  If your GIS is not designed for the smart grid, utilities can’t realize benefits in the same manner as what Oncor has.  Data quality issues that are going to cripple utilities include things like discrepancies between as-operated and as-built GIS, a GIS that does not provide enough protection against bad data, and inaccurate connectivity data. The good news is that at Intergraph, we offer G/Technology, which is an enterprise-ready GIS built for the smart grid.  It provides a direct feed of as-built facility data to the InService operational environment. G/Technology’s configurable business rules and robust feature model validation enforce data quality.  Additionally G/Technology provides the ability to define explicit relationships between transformers and customers so you have accurate connectivity data. Those are just some small examples of how important it is that your geospatial data is up to date and accurate. Laura Beth: So what are some key takeaways you got from attending this summit when it comes to preserving our future energy needs? Jennifer: Many sessions focused on the importance of geospatial technology and the importance of standard data exchange and collaboration between all agencies and responders.  There is also a big focus on renewable and alternative energy.  Utilities must be willing to change their way of thinking in regards to energy – whether you are talking about generation, storage, construction of plants, or how consumers expect to interact with utilities.  Businesses and consumers want to generate their own electricity, which has its challenges for utilities.  Other challenges being faced are how to price distributed generation, how to manage distributed assets, and how to best model these assets, and how we can be resilient after natural or military disasters impact assets in a way that can interrupt power for long periods of time.    Laura Beth: Jennifer, is there anything I haven’t asked that you would like to share with our audience? Jennifer: I would just encourage everyone to visit the Geo-Energy website and review the presentations and content. Every presentation given by the speakers is on the website with a link so you can view them and watch them yourself. Laura Beth: Jennifer, we appreciate your time, and thank you for being our guest. You can learn more about our Intergraph SG&I Utilities and Communications solutions by visiting our website at Intergraph.com/utilities.

In this podcast, I talk with Intergraph’s Sean Hatchett about one of the largest problems the transportation industry faces today. Hear how one Intergraph customer is redefining asset management through technology. Podcast Transcription: Laura Beth: Thank you for joining us for an Intergraph SG&I podcast. In today’s podcast, we are talking with Sean Hatchett who is the senior account executive, for government and transportation in Canada. Sean is based in our Mississauga office. Sean, thank you for joining us. Sean: Thankyou. Laura Beth: Today we are focusing on the transportation industry and the problems they face. Intergraph deals with customers across the globe that handles railways, highways, seaports and airports. Every one of these units has their own unique problems that must be met. Sean, first off, tell me what do you see are some of the biggest problems the transportation industry faces? Sean: The transportation industry will face new and emerging challenges in the future, which may dramatically reshape transportation priorities in Canada and needs over the next decades. The biggest challenges I see may derive from the impacts of major global trends, such as climate change, changes in the cost of fuels, new technology and from domestic trends, such as changing demographics and lifestyle expectations, changes in land use patterns and limitations in current transportation finance methods. Laura Beth:So let’s focus on highways in particular. Obviously, every region of the world has a different landscape, temperatures, etc. to deal with in maintaining a proper highway system. What are some challenges particular to the highway industry in Canada? Sean:Canada has more than a million kilometres of roads, roughly 38,000 of which make up the National Highway System. So road transportation is the most important mode of passenger and freight transportation, local and intercity transportation, intra-provincial transportation activities and trade between Canada and the United States. Canada faces many challenges relating to its road transportation infrastructure. Some are unique to the country such as its extensive land mass and often harsh climate, its high degree of urbanization and its high level of trade dependency, and some are shared by others, including the need for good asset management plans to deal with aging road and highway infrastructure, limited finances, issues of road safety and environmental considerations. Laura Beth:One of the problems you just stated was asset management. Why is asset management so critical? Sean: That’s a good question. Because it takes a long-term perspective, good asset management can maximize the benefits provided by infrastructure. It also affords the opportunity to achieve cost savings by spotting deterioration early on and taking action to rehabilitate or renew the asset. Good asset management is essential for all orders of government. It results in informed and strategically sound decisions that optimize investments, better manage risk, including the risk of infrastructure failure, and also takes into account the potential impact of other factors, such as climate change. For example, the Ministry of Transportation is increasingly applying preventative maintenance strategies to extend the life of pavements. Preventative treatments such as crack sealing, hot mix patching and thin surface applications help to maintain the pavement at a high level of service. When applied at the right time, these treatments can prolong pavement life up to 15 years, deferring the need for costly road reconstruction. Laura Beth:What is an example of a customer that is using technology to assist with asset management? Sean: I’ve talked about 407 ETR. They’re a great example of one of our customer’s that is using technology to support their asset management strategy. They strategically integrated their enterprise asset management platform for sign assets with Intergraph’s server technology -- a product GeoMediaÒ Smart Client -- and that provides them complete asset coverage and workflows, and synchronizes geo-location data to provide rich features to patrollers in the field.  The system also supports flexible configurations and workflows for inspections and repairs, and integrated with their EAM platform provides a foundational platform that will be replicated across other assets types such as pavement, culverts, electrical, etc. Laura Beth: This customer also can provide mobile access to the highway operations field team as well, correct? How does that work? Sean:Well, patrollers are the eyes, ears and hands that provide visibility into the conditions for the 407 highway. A lot of them are to prevent undesirable situations from occurring and responding to situations that must be addressed.  The patrollers require the means to receive information and direction, to provide that information and direction, and to record what they see and do.  The better the means to accomplish this, the more effective they will be. Their new sign inspection system fully supports true mobile workforce management and their sign inspection application provides an easy-to-use map-driven interface that enables the patroller’s full connectivity from the road to perform these inspections. Another thing, the system uses geo-location and GPS through end-to-end integrated bi-directional workflows between their asset management and GIS systems for work order generation, maintenance or repair. It’s a great system. Laura Beth: How has this changed the way they operate? What benefits are they seeing from implementing this solution? Sean:The new sign inspection system replaced a number of older, manual processesthat were managed by several disparate systems, so Excel, Access,  desktop sign inspection tools that they had prior. The new system now provides fully configurable web-based workflows that adheres to business rules, extending powerful GIS capabilities to non-technical end users in the field essentially simplifying the inspection process for the patrollers. By incorporating this technology into their asset management processes, the system provides their highway operations group some clear benefits to, one, better maximize the economic life of their assets. Reduce maintenance costs by ensuring that maintenance occurs promptly on schedule, minimizing equipment breakdowns and downtime.It helps them track spending on asset maintenance to allow for analysis and forecasting.Increase efficiency of inspections and maintenance.Increase maintenance productivity and reducing labor costs by using the technology to automate manual paper based processes.Protecting against potential liabilities.Ensure compliance with regulatory requirements, and helping them create easy access to digital records for inspections/maintenance that can be securely backed up. Laura Beth: How could others benefit from what 407 is doing? Sean: Well the way we see it transportation agencies and operational departments can use Smart Client technology to provide user friendly and streamlined field inspection and planning workflows, that includes asset information updates, reviewing related documents and drawings, adding photos and reviewing related information in their work order, permitting and enterprise asset management systems. These organizations can develop highly focused and efficient workflowswithout the need to develop and maintain extensive and expensive custom code, which ultimately reduces training overheads while increasing productivity and data quality. The key benefit is in the simple interface and ability to guide users via task-specific forms and workflows with built-in data validation. This increases information sharing and re-use thereby avoiding the inefficiencies, errors and risks that arise when departments work in data silos. Laura Beth: Is there anything I haven’t asked that you would like to share with our audience? Sean:What I didn’t mention about the 407 ETR sign inspection project is that they went from licensing and installation to production deployment in four months, and the operations team completed 8,000 inspections of signs within approximately five weeks versus the previous year’s inspection, which took four months. By leveraging key technology, 407 ETR is seeing a measurable increase in efficiency, accuracy and communication among their team in the field. In my opinion these ROI benefits highlight the true value of leveraging technology within an organization’s operational practice and ultimately creating efficient processes. Laura Beth:  Sean, we appreciate your time and thank you for being our guest. You can learn more about our Intergraph SG&I transportation solutions by visiting our website at Intergraph.com/transportation.

In this podcast, Intergraph’s Laura Beth Ezzell talks with David McDonald about his new role as the vice president and general manager of public safety in the Americas with Intergraph. Hear how his former career as a deputy chief in D.C. and now experience working for Intergraph helps make sure Intergraph customers are the central focus. Podcast Transcription: Laura Beth: Thank you for joining us for an Intergraph SG&I podcast. In today’s podcast, we are talking with David McDonald who is the vice president and general manager of public safety in the Americas. David is based in our Huntsville, Alabama, office. David, thank you for joining us. David: Glad to be here. Thank you Laura Beth: David has been with Intergraph for eight years.  Before his current position he was the vice president of operations for Intergraph public safety.  But earlier this year, you were moved into this new role of being responsible for sales and implementation for all U.S. public safety.  We wanted to take the time to get to know David better and get his vision and views of what he is doing and plans to do to make sure our public safety customers are getting what they need to grow and make smarter decisions. David, first off, I think it’s important to highlight that you once worked in the public safety field, correct? David: Correct, I’d spent more than 20 years as an officer with the Washington D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, going up in the ranks. When I retired after over 20 years I was a deputy chief in D.C. Laura Beth: And how has that background and job experience helped you in working for Intergraph? David: You know, it’s actually provided me a good insight. As part of my roles in D.C., I was responsible for the 911 center. I was director there and deputy director for many years. I worked in there a lot. We handled over 5,000 calls a day. And when I retired as a deputy chief I was responsible for all of IT for the police department, and they were underneath me, including records and communications as well. So that benefit in having commanded patrol and districts, I understand the operational needs of law enforcement and public safety. I had to liaison with fire in the past. Having the responsibility for all of that, I understand how technology can impact operations but also what the operations needs to be successful. Sometimes you’ll get a piece of software and they’ll say, oh this will give you some benefit, and operationally you have no need for it. So I think I get good insight into what the requirements are for our customers and what the IT and the products we have can actually benefit them and how it can benefit them and show that. Laura Beth: Great. Well David, you’ve had a few different roles at Intergraph. One of those was setting up the account manager program. What did you do in that role? David: One of the things we noticed a few years ago was that our customers did not have a single point of contact within Intergraph. You know when they had issues other than the help desk that was where they went. So the account manager program was set up to give them an advocate within Intergraph; someone they could go to for issues, for requests, if they want to buy additional software, training services or whatever. It became their point of contact for that. So we helped, one of the roles I had was setting that organization up. So we established the account manager program, assigned them to the customers and started meeting with the customers on a regular basis to understand what they needed and how their operations were going and what we could do to benefit them and help them. It’s been a successful program. We started with four account managers and now we’re up to eight and we hope to include even more in the coming years. Laura Beth: How did that role help you in building the relationships you have with our customers today? David: It helped me tremendously in understanding what the issues were that our customers faced. I’d hear from the customers what their concerns were and when I would go back to Intergraph and talk to services or support I’d hear a different story and realize there’s a disconnect somewhere. So it made me keenly aware of that disconnect and what the issues were from the customer perspective. And then when I took over services we became very customer centric and [included] the customers right in how we do things. Listen to the customer. Understanding what their concerns are. An easy example of that are upgrades. When trying to get the price down, the level of effort down so it becomes less expensive, if not no cost at all, is my goal ultimately. But we also keep resources on the location for two weeks. The week of and the week after go live. If they’d do a new upgrade in the past, they’d leave within a day or two of the cut over. If there weren’t any issues there, we just flew home for the weekend. No longer. We stay there. And that comes from listening to the customers and understanding what their problems were. So we become much more customer focused and customer centric in how we do things. Laura Beth: And that kind of leads into our next question of you obviously spend a lot of time with Intergraph public safety customers and have over your eight years of being with Intergraph. But how do you use the feedback and requests you get from Intergraph customers to make sure Intergraph, in software and developments, that we’re staying on track to offer what the public safety sector needs? David: In two ways. One is on the product development itself; understanding what the requirements are from our customers and what their needs are. And today as well as two years and three years down. So we work with the product center on what the road map is for the development of our next releases. Next generation CAD, updating all of the GUIs and our how our CAD looks and interacts with the user is on the road map in the near term to have that done as well. Second is on the customers listening on the service delivery side. Not having a service member come in and do something and talk to customer about an issue and then the next day another service person comes in and says, well that’s crazy and that’s wrong and I don’t understand what’s going on. So we’ve created implementation teams for upgrades as well as delivery of any products. You have the same resources for your project from day one to end. So you’re not getting turn over, change over. Listening to what the customer says and delivering the product and the services much more efficiently with the same person. Laura Beth: What do you see as the biggest challenges the public safety world is facing? David: I’m seeing a lot of requests for consolidations due to state and local budgets and things like that. A lot of states are having to evaluate the number of PSAPs, the number of call centers out there, so they can consolidate them. Hopefully, and fortunately in the past, we’ve been winning a lot of those and consolidating those other agencies into our systems. That seems to be the biggest one now as well as data sharing and exchange hubs for mutual aid and assisting each other across borders. Laura Beth: Well David, you’ve been in this new role for a few months now. How has it been? David: Exciting and interesting in that for the past few years I’ve not been involved in looking for new customers so that’s a different role for me and going out and getting prospects and bringing more cities and counties into the Intergraph family. Hopefully we’ll continue to do that and be successful. We need to be successful because the more customers the more I can work to lower costs on upgrades and other things and grow the company and keep our customers happy. Laura Beth: What is your vision or goals you have in this new role? David: Two fold. One is to be successful and I want to win everything we go after on the new customer side. But a hundred percent customers reference, I want every customer to be happy with our implementations and services. I know that’s not a realistic goal, but [we] try to get as close as we can. It’s hard to make everyone happy all the time but to become known for our customer service and our advocacy for our customers within the industry. Laura Beth: Is there anything we haven’t asked you that you would like to share with our audience? David: You’ve been very thorough and good questions and looking forward to continue on in this new role and growing public safety in the U.S. and keeping our customers, customers. Laura Beth: David, we appreciate your time and thank you for being our guest. You can learn more about our Intergraph SG&I’s public safety solutions by visiting our website at Intergraph.com/publicsafety.

Laura Beth: Thank you for joining us for an Intergraph SG&I podcast. In today’s podcast we are speaking with Paul Lau. He is the Power Supply and Grid Operations Assistant General Manager at the Sacramento Municipal Utility District also known as SMUD. Paul is here to talk to us about creating a smarter control room for a smarter grid. Paul, first off I just wanted to thank you for taking the time to join us.   Paul: No problem, my pleasure.   Laura Beth: Paul, what do you consider to be a smarter control room?   Paul: I think really if you look at most control rooms in America, It really hasn’t changed probably in the 32 years that I’ve been there it really hasn’t changed. You’ve still got the big wall map and so you have a lot of pins coming off the wall and you really don’t have a lot of visibility actually looking into your distribution systems. How do we actually take our distribution control centers and take it into the 21st century?   Laura Beth: So what are some measures you are taking to do that?    Paul: Number one we actually have gotten rid of all our wall maps. Our screen now is going to be a huge screen. It’s like 30 feet by 90 feet screen to show you everything that is happening into the distribution systems. They can take all this information and make real time actions out of it.   Laura Beth: Do you feel like this movement towards a digital wall map is making a difference in response time?   Paul: Yes, so what we wanted to do was we really wanted to improve the way we dispatch our crews, the way we actually run our distribution system. The way we actually look at outages and outage responses and outage management. So that’s kind of what we really want to do.   Laura Beth: What are some of the biggest challenges for a utilities department today? Obviously people expect that as soon as the power goes out, you are going to have it right back on right?   Paul: Right, historically the power companies are really pretty good in terms of keeping a system on 99.9 percent of the time. Customers don’t really expect an outage. And so customers don’t really know that we don’t they’re out. They actually have to call us. We don’t really know. Before the days of a smart meter, we really don’t know. The only visibility we have is problem at the substation feeder circuit level. We have no visibility beyond the feeders and the substation SCADA systems. So now is the first time that you actually have smart meter data out there that you actually know who’s on and whose off. You know the voltage and stuff that you have out there. You know the loading that’s out there. And now on top of it you have all the distributed information that you have out there.   Laura Beth: Right and you mentioned smart meters. How many smart meters do you have in operation today?   Paul: We have 620 thousand smart meters. Every single one of our accounts has a smart meter.  And we have a remote connect disconnect so which is on every single residential account meter.   Laura Beth: And I guess on addition to that is the ping tool that you guys have implemented, correct?   Paul: Yeah, we can actually ping our meters off our smart meter network to see who is on and who is off. So a lot of calls like nested outages, we don’t have to worry about anymore. We can now actually have the visibility so say well before you roll off and go work on something else, you need to actually go work on this house because there’s actually the house is not back on and what is the reason.   Laura Beth: I know that you guys get a lot of visitors and I was just curious what do you share with them about the technology that you use and what advice can you give them of them of thinking about making steps like this?    Paul: Well it’s actually a pretty major technology and culture shift within your company. So this is a journey that you have to take with your company and in terms of clearly laying out the road maps of how to get there. So besides just having the money and having the workforce efficiency gain to fund your capital expenditures to do all of this you also have to understand the cultural change and the skill set requirements so the new operator of the new agents is actually out there working with two, 30-inch screen monitors; instead of nothing, right; instead of walking over to your wall map.   Laura Beth:  Right that learning curve of getting them to use the new technology can be daunting.   Paul: A lot of it is actually change management. They’re been doing this type of stuff for really at least 32 years I’ve been here. It really hasn’t changed that much. Now you are asking those guys to actually use the geospatial tools you are asking them to look at databases in terms of coming out with information. With a click of the finger they can see now where things are but how do you actually help them make sense of it so they can actually take actions upon them. How do you present that information in a way that is actually helps them make better decisions. So that’s the kind of the challenge any company would go through is they really need to understand what are they trying to do? Are they trying to improve dispatching, are they trying to improve outage? Are they trying to improve system losses? Are they trying to do distribution integration? Are you looking at it purely, simply to know correlation between your assets and how they are performing? So you really need to understand what are you trying to do with this new system that you have. And what is the return on investment to get out of this.   Laura Beth: What’s some of the feedback you’ve received from customers? Do you think they see a difference? Do you feel you’re getting a return on your investment?   Paul: Yeah, we do. I think one of the interesting things is now it’s interesting is one of the interesting phenomenon, because now with the smart meters put in, the customer has the expectation that you know that they’re out. So that’s something that’s new. So before they kind of didn’t know, now we actually go out there and tell them we’re doing all these upgrades to our system to improve their reliability to improve outage communication there’s an expectation that you deliver on that. And there’s something to be said about that.   Laura Beth: And you touched on this Paul about people come to visit you it’s hard to take that step to make the investment. So but do you feel like you’ve seen a return on your investment that you’ve made?   Paul: We think so, so when our operators actually look at how to dispatch the crews, when they look at loading the system up, when they actually look at in terms of getting real live information on outage management and besides that we also did a lot of the advance operating systems that we put in remote switching and optimization so it wasn’t just the tool itself. It wasn’t just the wall maps itself. It was all the stuff that comes with it so we actually do a lot of automated switching, automated sectionalizing and restoration.  That switching that used to take 45 minutes is now less than a minute.   Laura Beth: What kind of partnership do you have to have with Intergraph to move forward and already set up these things that you have done?   Paul: We have a very long history working with Intergraph. We’ve been with them for like fourteen years now so they’re one of our OMS and GIS vendors. They’re one of our early partners when we actually envisioned what we called systems delivery and information technology projects back in 2001. They have been a long trusted partner.  They saw the same vision for the integration of our enterprise software. They actually came in and operate our OMS and GIS, so we have a very long trusted relationship with Intergraph that they understand what we are trying to achieve and it matches their company road map. And they were actually pretty instrumental in terms of doing a lot of modifications that hopefully their other clients would actually benefit from. When we actually did all our customization for the OMS upgrade. They did a lot of things for us a lot of new functionality on the wall maps that without them it wouldn’t work. Without them I don’t think we would have gotten the adoption from our operators if it wasn’t for them. So it’s got to be a trusted partner.     Laura Beth: Well Paul our time is up but I appreciate you sharing with us today about how you are creating smarter control room for a smarter grid.   Paul: Ok, take care.   Laura Beth: You can learn more about our Intergraph SG&I Utilities and Communications solutions by visiting our website at Intergraph.com/utilities.

Laura Beth: Thank you for joining us for an Intergraph SG&I podcast. In today’s podcast we are talking to Lukas Pilny who is an Applicaton Engineer at our Intergraph Czech Republic location. Lukas, thank you for joining us.     Lucas: Your Welcome.   Laura Beth: Lukas, first just tell me about yourself and your role at Intergraph.   Lukas: I have been at Intergraph since the 2010. And I work with as an Application Engineer or my official title is Application Engineer but I am not a developer. I am responsible for contact between our customers and I’m sharing customer requirements between our internal developer. Sometimes it depends on projects I am doing for social designer and I am owner of some of our local project ware.   Laura Beth: Ok. And we are talking with you because we are talking with some our Intergraph employees who used to previously work in a Pubic Safety type job or in the Public Safety industry. So where did you work before you came to Intergraph?   Lukas: Before I came to Intergraph I worked for about six years in fire and rescue service. My title rank was ? Colonel. I was head of central data warehouse for emergency calls and crisis management. Emergency calls is the 112 something like 911 you have in the United States. I was involved in several local projects which were mainly focused on crisis management.   Laura Beth: And what made you want to go into that industry?   Lukas: I finished my school as a GIS specialist and this was one of the possibilities. So I choose this state agency because it’s very popular agency, very well known. It’s GIS technology, all GIS solutions for Public Safety at the time was at a very high level and it was a very huge system.   Laura Beth: So how did your work as a former employee in the fire services and handling emergency 112 calls, how does that help you in working with Intergraph customers now?   Lukas: It was a state agency and a very huge agency. About twelve thousand people called I think with out public safety agencies in the Czech Republic. So I believe I can understand the people and the customer in the state agencies. I believe I can better understand what they need. How they manage their budget. How they think and what they need.   Laura Beth: Right, so as an Application Engineer how are you able to use your prior experience to help them in adopting new technology.   Lukas: It always depends on a certain project. But for me as an Application Engineer not a developer it’s very important to explain to them the benefits of the solution or the software and the future improvements and the future life of this project. How the requirements of the project will be finished, will be completed.   Laura Beth: You said you kind of came out of school with a focus on GIS. How have you seen that change from the time you entered the industry and now working with Intergraph these past four years. How important is GIS to the Public Safety industry?   Lukas: I would say that GIS is not hundred percent of their solution but it’s very important because the guys in Public Safety don’t have time to read some text information they just need to see where they are and what’s around them so it’s very important. I would say it’s the only available information source for them.   Laura Beth: And how has it changed from your six years in your prior job to working with Intergraph. How have you seen that change in helping customers adapt to that change?   Lukas: Everything is online. Right. It’s simply that everything is online is the biggest change I can see and I understand right now. Six years ago when I was pubic safety sharing files on CDS and local drives and now everything is online, everything is shared via web services. So that’s what’s changed and it’s very important to respect the standards because in Public Safety it’s important it’s necessary to cooperate with other agencies and in other foreign agencies from defense states so people when they work online they need to speak in the same standard.   Laura Beth: Right, and what are some challenges specifically in your area in the Czech Republic of Intergraph helping those customers in that area meet their demands that they need?   Lukas: We need to explain to them that Intergraph is a huge company with a huge experience in Pubic Safety Europe. We have earned many knowledge from our past from all over the world. We can help them very quickly and a very low costs. They don’t have to search for solution, just ask us for the experience from other parts of the world.   Laura Beth: Lukas, we appreciate your time and thank you for being our guest. You can learn more about our Intergraph SG&I Public Safety solutions by visiting our website at Intergraph.com/publicsafety.