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Episode #178: "Breaking Boundaries: Cross-Industry Innovation at IMGIS 2024" with Pat Hohl and Bill Meehan, Directors at ESRI [Special Energy Central Power Perspectives™ Podcast Presented by ESRI]

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As a departure from the usual format on the Energy Central Power Perspectives Podcast, this episode features an exclusive guest-led conversation with two of the most familiar voices in the Energy Central community: Bill Meehan and Pat Hohl, both Directors at Esri. In this episode, Bill and Pat dive deep into the themes and insights to be explored at the upcoming IMGIS Conference, set to take place this upcoming October.

Throughout this engaging discussion, they focus on how innovation in infrastructure management is unlocking the potential of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) across industries. From emergency management to AI-driven imagery to digital transformation, Bill and Pat highlight the key takeaways for professionals across the utility sector. Listen in as they explore cross-industry solutions, the power of GIS in utilities, and how new technology can revolutionize day-to-day tasks.

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Thanks to the sponsor of this episode of the Energy Central Power Perspectives Podcast: Esri

 

Key Links:

GIS for Electric Utilities from ESRI: https://www.esri.com/en-us/industries/electric/overview 

Latest Esri E-Book: "Successful Digital Utilities Enabled by Modern Network Information Management":  https://go.esri.com/UN_eBook_EC

IMGIS 2024

Episode 10: ‘The Past & Future of Circuits & How GIS is Transforming the Grid, COVID-19 Response, & More’: https://energycentral.com/c/iu/energy-central-power-perspectives%E2%84%A2-podcast-episode-10-%E2%80%98-past-future-circuits-how   

Episode 12: ‘To Unlock the Modern Utility, GIS is Key’: https://energycentral.com/c/iu/energy-central-power-perspectives%E2%84%A2-podcast-episode-12-%E2%80%98-unlock-modern-utility-gis 

Episode 47: 'GIS, Digital Twin, and the Intelligent Reality of Utilities Today': https://energycentral.com/o/energy-central/special-edition-gis-digital-twin-and-intelligent-reality-utilities-today-pat-hohl 

Episode 80: 'Taking a Geographic Approach to Public Grid Investment': https://energycentral.com/o/energy-central/episode-80-taking-geographic-approach-public-grid-investment-bill-meehan-and-pat 

Episode 95: 'Debating Utilities' Role In Transportation Electrification': https://energycentral.com/o/energy-central/episode-95-debating-utilities-role-transportation-electrification-esris-bill 

Episode 131: 'Unlocking the Power of GIS: Sharing, Understanding, and Capturing Utility Data': https://energycentral.com/o/esri/special-episode-unlocking-power-gis-sharing-understanding-and-capturing-utility 

Episode 132: 'Harnessing GIS for Strategic Utility Insight': https://energycentral.com/o/energy-central/special-episode-harnessing-gis-strategic-utility-insight-pat-hohl-and-bill-meehan 

Episode 133: 'The Role of GIS Data, Mobility, and Digital Twins': https://energycentral.com/c/iu/special-episode-role-gis-data-mobility-and-digital-twins-pat-hohl-and-bill-meehan 

Pat Hohl’s Energy Central Profile: energycentral.com/member/profile/204983/about 

Bill Meehan’s Energy Central Profile: https://energycentral.com/member/profile/360/about 

Ask a Question to Our Future Guests: Do you have a burning question for the utility executives and energy industry thought leaders that we feature each week on the Energy Central Power Perspectives Podcast? Do you want to hear your voice on a future episode? Well starting in 2024, we’re offering you that opportunity! Head to this link where you can leave us a recorded message, including a question you’re eager to have answered on a future episode of the podcast. We’ll listen through them, pick out the right guests in our upcoming lineup to address them, and you’ll hear yourself as a part of the conversation! Energy Central on SpeakPipe: www.speakpipe.com/EnergyCentralPodcast 

 

TRANSCRIPT

Matt Chester:

Hello and welcome to a special episode of the Energy Central Power Perspectives Podcast. Usual listeners know that we typically feature our host Jason Price, interviewing important guests from across the power industry, but for the second year in a row we’re excited to interrupt that regular schedule and bring you a conversation directly led by the guests themselves, Bill Meehan and Pat Hohl.

Regular listeners of the podcast won’t need an introduction to Bill and Pat, as they are some of the most frequent guests of the Energy Central Power Perspectives Podcast, but in case this is your first time listening in to them you are in for a treat, as these two Directors at Esri are going to be chatting about the upcoming IM GIS conference, exploring how innovation and digital transformation in infrastructure management are unlocking the potential of GIS across industries. With insights on everything from emergency management to AI-driven imagery, this episode offers valuable takeaways for anyone in utilities, transportation, or telecommunications.

Enjoy!

 

Bill Meehan:

Welcome everybody to our podcast. Today, my name is Bill Meehan. Joining me today is my colleague, Pat Hohl. And today, we're gonna be talking about our conference coming up in the fall called IMGIS. What are the kind of the themes that are going to be present throughout this conference is this concept of innovation. So Pat, talk a little bit about innovation in relationship to our conference at IMS

 

Pat Hohl:

Well, we attend a lot of events and there is a lot of talk these days about innovation. I think innovation and technology is really important. Maybe we should start by identifying what IMGIS stands for. It's a little bit of a pun IMGIS, but it really means infrastructure management around GIS. And I like to ask the question where does innovation even come from? And it can come from a lot of different places, including the technology. But I think one of the most tasking places that innovation comes from is when you see an idea in another place and you think to yourself, I could use that in what I do and you apply that to your own work. And IMGIS and as much as it pulls in electric, gas and water, utilities, telecommunications providers, transportation, there's a lot of different cross pollination of ideas there, and if you're an electric utility and you're struggling with telecommunications., wouldn't you like to hear how the telecommunications people are are solving those problems? Doesn't that make sense to you?

 

Bill Meehan:

It surely does, yeah. One of the things that I think about with innovation again is looking at other industries or what other people have done. And I don't know about you, but I spent a lot of time buying cars, buying and selling cars. I don't know. I know you have to because it's the thing. And I went to a place I'm not gonna say who that is because I'm not gonna pitch them, but I sold  a couple of cars and they did something really fantastic. You go in a room and. they have a dashboard that tells you exactly where are you along in the step of long in that process and they tell you everything. If they communicate it so brilliantly that I'm thinking to myself why can't utilities internally do that sort of thing, or why can't you know when you sit in an emergency room? Why can't they tell you where you are in sequence and you know, we're gonna see a lot of things around field productivity doing things and not like the same old way. And I think innovation there and not just in huge innovations or huge inventions, but in some of the tasks that you do every single day that can really, really pay a lot of dividends.

What do you think about that? I mean I think that that's something we should really look at and I do think you're gonna get that here. Not that you won't get it in the electrical sections, you will, but you might want to look at like I love. I love railroads. I mean, I'd like to sit in a couple of the railroad sessions and see how they do stuff because they gotta track trains and they have to do this kind of tracking everything. It's pretty fascinating what they've done with new technology and using GIS.

 

Pat Hohl:

It's exactly the kind of thing that I'm talking about. And I think you're probably baiting me with a car question here because you know, I could talk about cars for a while. 

 

Bill Meehan:

We can. I'll come and press for a long time, yeah.

 

Pat Hohl:

If you were to query a set of utility executives and say what are the big challenges that you're working on, I'll bet you they would name some things like productivity. How do we utilize artificial intelligence? How do we deal with equity and sustainability, better project delivery? Better customer engagement and finally transforming many of these paper processes to digital or electronic processes. There's a theme on every one of those things this year at IMGIS focused around what other utilities are doing, where they're winning and how they're doing it. And the true stories of what they've done. And you and I both had to sign a lot of travel requests and decide who went to which kind of conferences. If I was picking a conference to send an engineering manager or an operations manager to to get some real useful ideas about how to advance our business, this is where I would send them. How about you?

 

Bill Meehan:

That's right. And when I think about, you know, kind of the things that really make a difference in running a utility, it's really the three C's: collaboration, communication and coordination. And if you could figure that out, that would really be good. The other thing that and that those three C's apply to many, many industries. Well, how about this? Even to sports teams, right. When you think about a football team, they they think about, well, what's the other team gonna do and how am I gonna exploit their weakness? How am I gonna leverage my own or kind of minimize my weakness and kind of put the two pieces together? When you think about the major thing that has happened in our industry is? Storms and emergency preparedness and emergency response and you think and if you think of, well, what would a football team? Well the enemy or the other team is the weather and where are the places in our system that are really weak and what would I do with it and then how do I leverage that? How do I shore that up? How do I practice it so that I don't end up with that. So there's another whole section on kind of Emergency Management that applies not just to electric but to gas and to rail and to water, all of these things. And so I think when we think about what they do compared to what you do, that's gonna be interesting. So go to the sessions. You might even poke your nose into some of the SIG events that have to do with nothing with your industry. And you can hear people tell their stories. And that's really the key is storytelling. I think you're gonna hear a lot of storytelling at IMGIS. And the use of our technology.

 

Pat Hohl:

Well. You mentioned the SIG. We might have some listeners that don't know what a SIG is, special interest group. And so that is a loosely structured informal time where birds of a feather, if you will, can get together and talk about the things that they want to talk about, identify where their successes are, but where their challenges are as well. Find other people that they can connect with and share ideas and continue that conversation as things go further. You are absolutely correct. When I go to events I kind of make a sport of seeing what people are most interested in and people are always, always interested in Emergency Management.

 

Bill Meehan:

Yeah. And one of the things that's that's kind of evolving over the years and when I was doing GIS, what 20-30 years ago, we never thought about imagery. I mean imagery was just sort of you know like taking a picture or maybe a satellite photo. But imagery has become really, really integral to the operations and the planning of utilities and and all these other industries. And it'll be interesting to see what other industries are doing with imagery to see how they use image and leverage image and ith artificial intelligence. Because artificial intelligence not only takes the picture looks at the picture, but it actually can analyze things.

One of my favorite demos that one of my colleagues puts together put together was this idea of looking at imagery to figure out where water is going to flow underneath and undermine a structure like a transmission tower. And who would have thought you could do that? Well, really, or maybe using it in vegetation management, looking at imagery and seeing, hey, this tree, I can tell what kind of tree that is by looking at the imagery and analyzing it. It's fascinating stuff. So you're gonna see a lot of stuff on imagery as we at IMGIS. It's really a fascinating and that's really where innovation can really, really happen.

 

Pat Hohl:

I think you're right. Imagery was absolutely fascinating years ago when we first got our digital orthophotography for the service territory. A coworker of mine joked that he wasn't going to be happy until he could stick his hand out the window, waves to the sky and see it on his screen. A real time satellite view if you will. And of course we're not there yet for utilities. But did you know that some of our business partners will allow you to task a satellite on the website today, take a fresh set of images of that in the next 24 hours and you'll have fresh imagery of that area tomorrow. Imagine that usefulness in terms of emergency response and seeing what your damage looks like.

 

Bill Meehan:

Yeah. I mean, damage assessment is huge and if it you know we we think about restoration for a power company if we have to run around with with pens and paper and yellow notebooks to go out in the field and capture all this imagery, it takes a long time and then you have to bring it back and analyze it. But the combination of things like field inspection, surgery, drones, dashboards, and mobility. All of these things put together creates a real powerful tools to be able to restore power and that's what people really want. They don't wanna wait around for. Well, we're gonna get to it, but we gotta do all this analysis first couple of hours before we can even figure out what our damage is and then get the crews that we need to to fix and send them to where when they need to be fixed. So that's really, really something fascinating. I'd like to talk also about this concept of digital transformation. Pat, give me a little example of this digital what does that mean and why is IMGIS a place that you can go to get that concepts of digital transformation nailed?

 

Pat Hohl:

It reminds me of a couple of years ago at the Esri user conference at the Special Interest Group meeting somebody she officially asked a question about their paper process, and I could see that they were somewhat embarrassed to even ask the question, and I stopped at the group and I just said. Show of hands. Who is still dealing with paper processes? That they're not proud of and they wish that they could digitize every hand in the room, went up every every single hand. And so I think it's important to realize. As an industry, we're starting from a fairly low level of historical technology and capability. We've been doing things the same way for a long time. We've made a lot of advancements, but we have a long way to go. And so I think it's really key to be able to hear from other users about. Where they have seen success, where they have enjoyed leveraging their GIS platform, most utilities are using Esri software in mapping their infrastructure. How can you make the most of that, especially if you have an enterprise license agreement and you have access to all this capability that maybe you're not using to its fullest extent? It's incredible to hear what other people are doing in your industry and other industries and you know, you only have to come home with one good idea from a conference to make it all worthwhile. I always thought that I went to conferences and I thought if I come home with one, maybe 2 good ideas that I can apply, it's going to be all worthwhile.

 

Bill Meehan:

And maybe what you do is before you get there, you think to yourself that I need some ideas, but think about some of the big problems you have, not just in terms of the GIS, but just generally like what are some of the big problems you have. Like I always think of customer service. They're not all that happy necessarily. We do surveys about my customer satisfaction, all kind of stuff. But what if you could like think about GIS in a new way of and you mentioned equity and different kinds of because people are different all over the place, but it's too bad we don't have a tool that could actually map out what people, what people think.

And you know what kind of coffee there is for them. But guess what? We do have that sort of stuff. And why not apply that to outage restoration or apply it to investments, apply equity in and what people think? What their motivation is? You know latte people and you have, you know, black coffee people like me, you know, all those kinds of things. I think that's really gonna be fascinating. And that's really, I think the the notion of digital transformation, one of the companies that I really admire using technology in terms of digital transformation is Uber. I mean, how many we take over all the time or Lyft or any of these kind of services and it really what it does is it flips the equation around. Instead of, you know, flagging down a cab or calling a cab company and say, can you come there, they come to you and they know where you are and you don't have to pay them. It just happens. I mean, you can you pay them, but you don't have to pay them right there you have the cash. That's really transformational the whole equation around and I think sometimes because we're so ingrained in our processes, it's really good to take a fresh look and find out what other what other industries are, what other customers have. One to flip the equation around and that's really I think the the whole notion of mobility does flips that equation around.

 

Pat Hohl:

I think that captures it very nicely, so let's talk about a couple of specifics. IMGIS is an Esri conference Esri and you can find it on the web. The link will be in the description as well. It is in October the 22nd to the 24th in Palm Springs, CA. Yeah, Palm Springs is nice in October. There will be a golf tournament the day before, if that interests you. And it's a very lovely facility with somewhere around 1200 really great utility people as well. So would Bill and I would like to personally invite you to consider coming to IMGIS this year, either in person or digitally. If you want to participate virtually. Any final words for the audience, bill?

 

Bill Meehan:

No, I think it's stated it well. I always look forward to this conference because it's so focused and it uses the technology we'll have. And by the way, we'll also have technical sessions as well, right, all kinds of technical people who, by the way, didn't have to travel very far from Redlands. A lot of people from Redlands, we have a big staff, have technically fantastic people. They'll be there to answer your questions. And you'll be able to see the people who actually creates the software. They'll be there. 

 

Pat Hohl:

Absolutely. Great point. And a lot of our business partners as well that help with implementations and extending the technology. There'll be heavy partner participation there. So I would want to personally invite you to consider attending IMGIS this year.

 

Bill Meehan:

That's right. We'll see you in October. 

 

Pat Hohl:

Thank you. See you in October.

 

 

 

About Energy Central Podcasts

The ‘Energy Central Power Perspectives™ Podcast’ features conversations with thought leaders in the utility sector. At least twice monthly, we connect with an Energy Central Power Industry Network community member to discuss compelling topics that impact professionals who work in the power industry. Some podcasts may be a continuation of thought-provoking posts or discussions started in the community or with an industry leader that is interested in sharing their expertise and doing a deeper dive into hot topics or issues relevant to the industry.

The ‘Energy Central Power Perspectives™ Podcast’ is the premiere podcast series from Energy Central, a Power Industry Network of Communities built specifically for professionals in the electric power industry and a place where professionals can share, learn, and connect in a collaborative environment. Supported by leading industry organizations, our mission is to help global power industry professionals work better. Since 1995, we’ve been a trusted news and information source for professionals working in the power industry, and today our managed communities are a place for lively discussions, debates, and analysis to take place. If you’re not yet a member, visit www.EnergyCentral.com to register for free and join over 200,000 of your peers working in the power industry.

The Energy Central Power Perspectives™ Podcast is hosted by Jason Price, Community Ambassador of Energy Central. Jason is a Business Development Executive at West Monroe, working in the East Coast Energy and Utilities Group. Jason is joined in the podcast booth by the producer of the podcast, Matt Chester, who is also the Community Manager of Energy Central and energy analyst/independent consultant in energy policy, markets, and technology.  

If you want to be a guest on a future episode of the Energy Central Power Perspectives™ Podcast, let us know! We’ll be pulling guests from our community members who submit engaging content that gets our community talking, and perhaps that next guest will be you! Likewise, if you see an article submitted by a fellow Energy Central community member that you’d like to see broken down in more detail in a conversation, feel free to send us a note to nominate them.  For more information, contact us at [email protected]. Podcast interviews are free for Expert Members and professionals who work for a utility.  We have package offers available for solution providers and vendors. 

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