The process was modified to reflect that once the vision has been created, in each of the successive steps, that vision should be recommunicated. To truly get to step eight, where a standards-based approach has been anchored in the culture – the vision that describes why the organization undertook the change must be reemphasized continuously. Some people may have not been reached the first time around, some people may have resisted the effort if the change didn’t directly impact them. It is always good to reinforce the value that the organization is receiving – especially when there exists an organizational impulse to act first and plan later.

Step 1: Create a sense of urgency​

Avenue for Conversation: Dissatisfaction with the Status quo

To create a sense of urgency, one needs to create a dissatisfaction with the status quo. Sometimes this can be difficult to do. People go about their day-to-day jobs and may not take the time to think about “is there a better way?”

There is only the job and how they were trained to do it. But with a little prodding, with some well-placed questions, there are opportunities to raise awareness. For example, a utility might recognize that their GIS data could be better – that there are gaps; equipment that may be connected on phases that differ from the as-designed, assets that are mislocated, or assets that may differ from as-designed. One driver for this can be changes that were made during storm damage recovery that were accurately recorded. Other errors might be introduced when maps and other designs are moved from system to system or person to person within the enterprise. Sometimes merely asking, “Are these errors tracked?” or “Do we know what these errors cost us?” can be enough to raise awareness.

Avenue for Conversation: Friction between IT/OT

Another potential avenue for a conversation about the CIM, is to understand if there is friction between IT and OT related to data integration. Past friction may have been the result from systems being acquired without data integration costs being fully understood. “We paid [insert amount here] and it costs us [x times more] once it was fully installed.” If there is dissatisfaction with such a scenario, the change agent may be able to take advantage of the situation to discuss the advantages associated with a standards-based approach to data integration.

These kinds of conversations can bring up what is referred to as the “WiFi cost model” of data integration. Have you ever noticed that if you stay in a lower cost hotel room the WiFi is free? But in an expensive hotel room, you pay extra for WiFi? That’s the WiFi model when it comes to data integration. If you talk to small utilities that don’t have the development staff, often their expectation is that the data integration comes fully baked into the acquisition cost of a product. They have neither the time, nor the staff, nor the funding for big integration projects or customized code.

Avenue for conversation: Never waste a good failure.

Has there been an implementation project that may have missed its mark, with budget overruns, perhaps missed deadlines, or sacrificed functionality? This would be a good time to think about if any of these failures derived from underlying data integration or data definition issues that could be addressed by a standards-based approach.

Step 2: Form a coalition​

If you’re frustrated by the costs and complexity with integrating large enterprise systems, chances are you’re not alone. There are other like-minded people in the utility, but they may work in other areas of the organization. The domain of data may differ from yours, but the same data integration challenges probably exist. There may even be people that are aware of other successful utility CIM projects (see CIM Success Stories in the appendix) who want to replicate that success in your utility. Find a champion in the senior management ranks and you may be on your way.

Step 3: Create a vision for change​

Strategy and vision are things that can’t be abdicated in favor of what your consultant thinks. For staff augmentation, consultants are a tremendous resource, but consultants tend to solve the last problem they worked on – and as the tongue in cheek quote says, “Consultants: If there’s no solution, there’s real money to be made in prolonging the problem”. A bit facetious perhaps, but with the CIM there is a solution, but a solution that tends to reduce billable hours for consultants that specialize in data integration. Hence, all things being equal, such consultants may not be in favor of solutions that provide a roadmap for faster, more flexible integrations. This is where the organization needs to cast the vision, and then have the consultants (and the internal SMEs and stakeholders), execute upon it.

Step 4: Communicate the vision​

Probably one of the biggest misconceptions is that communicating the vision is a “one and done” kind of deal. It is not. The vision must be constantly reinforced. It takes a while to change a culture and the easiest path is often to revert to the way things were done before – the known but broken. Thus, wins must be celebrated, communities of practice need to be engaged, and the guiding principles of standards-based integration reinforced. And in each of the successive steps described below, the communication of the vision must be made again and again.

Step 5: Remove obstacles​

These might be the systems and tools that don’t facilitate standards-based integration. These might be people and practices for example, naysayers⁵⁴:  
"The CIM? Does anyone even use it?”  
“Yes, we’re familiar with the CIM, but none of our customers ask for it.”  
“We’ve heard of the CIM, but my understanding is that it hasn’t been updated in a while.”  
“Oh sure, we could use the CIM, but it changes all the time.”  
“The CIM? Yes, we have one - but it’s not the standard, we created our own.”  
The common thread in these kinds of comments is that the people making them clearly didn’t understand the state of the CIM and how it had been successfully used, or they have an agenda.

Some examples:

• Consultants might push for a product that they like because it’s the product they know. This was seen at a utility where the consultants that were hired advocated for a vendor – which happened to be their prior employer. A reminder to ask your consultants about any challenges to their objectivity.
• Vendors that would rather lock you into their product via the integration. It is much harder and much more expensive to swap out to a competing vendor’s product if you must redo all the interfaces. Is the data integration based on the whim of the vendor? Or are you setting the strategic vision?
• Vendors that either get an upsell on the data integration or their business model includes a partner that also profits on the data integration business.

As the CIM has matured as has the capability of the user community to provide data integration guidance and testing capabilities in addition to the CIM family of standards, less of this is seen – but the reader must be aware that these agendas may be out there.

Step 6: Create Short-term Wins​

One should keep in mind, the first iteration of implementing the CIM won’t provide much value over that of using a customized solution – save usually for one big advantage:

No one must be locked into a room to debate what things are called, how they are defined, and how they are related.

That difficult work has already been done. The users instead can spend that time understanding the model, what definitions already exist, and focus on small projects that the team can use to improve their familiarity of the CIM. Also, just like with other disciplines related to software engineering, a little bit of training can go a long way. If you’re reading this book, you may already be trying to develop your understanding. Participating in the “CIM University” (the first day of training when a CIM Users Group meeting is held), is another way to quickly be grounded in the CIM and its concepts.

The emphasis should be on creating a short-term win, some small data exchange – then build from there. As seen in the Point-to-Point Standards Integration Cost Framework report (see Additional Resources at the end of this chapter), the real gain of value occurs in each successive interface built using the CIM. With each new interface the developers gain knowledge of the underlying data model, and the formal design of the web service interfaces, accelerating their ability and being able to leverage prior interfaces using the CIM-based approach.

How to fail: Someone decides to “Big bang a CIM project”. The thinking may be that “surely if a standards-based interface is good in one area, if semantic mapping is good for one – it must be good for everything”. An initiative is then undertaken to convert all the interfaces of the organization to using the CIM.

Such a project is doomed to failure. Costs will be incurred with no incremental value. And often a large initiative like this will fail under its own weight. Small, incremental changes, as new systems are brought online, is a better way to build maturity over time.

Step 7: Build on the change​

This is an opportunity to celebrate the victory and once again, recommunicate the vision. Identify the next interface or the next use case where the CIM can be used. It is important to have tracked the costs of implementing the first change and be able to measure against a baseline because as these successive interfaces are built the incremental cost savings become part of the communication.

Step 8: Anchor the changes in the culture​

Again, this comes down to communication: celebrating the victories and the people that made it happen. However, there can be another challenge with changing the corporate culture that can be described as overcoming the “run to failure mode of utility IT”. Consider investor-owned utilities. They are incentivized to get a return on equity – capital investment. Thus, they desire to keep operations and maintenance costs as low as possible. As may be the case, there will be times where in a drive to keep these costs low, software support for enterprise systems may be cut. Or patches or other software updates are not kept up with. Over time these corporate systems incur architectural debt (see additional resources) that eventually must be addressed – often in the form of a large capital project that will be put into a rate base request.

The challenge is that changing the corporate culture to a standards-based approach to data integration and/or semantic modeling may require an incremental increase in O&M – that may not rise to the level that meets the requirements of a capital investment. It may be the O&M “hump” that an organization cannot get over. Yes, standards-based data integration holds down O&M costs over time – but switching to that approach may cost more in the short-term. Hence, there can be incentive-based barriers in addition to the normal “that’s not how we do it here” barriers one might see with other changes.

As this eight-step model is reviewed it is easy to see that it should not be wholly sequential – but that step four – communicating the vision – should be revisited as the new guiding principle of standards-based integration becomes ingrained in the culture of the organization, as shown in the figure below.

Footnotes

⁵² The Great Fire of Rome occurred in July of AD 64. The fire was brought under control after six days but managed to reignite and burned for three more. When it was finally controlled only a third of Rome remained standing. https://www.nationalgeographic.org/thisday/jul19/great-fire-rome/

⁵³ Kotter, J. P. (2012). Leading Change. Harvard Business Review Press; 1R edition.

⁵⁴ All the following are quotes from real people