The cable industry is known for coming together in partnership to advance new technologies and roll out new services to consumers and now businesses. They have come together once again, as Charter, Comcast, Cox, and Time Warner Cable have developed a partnership with CableLabs and the Cable Center to host the 2nd annual Cable GIS Broadband Workshop on September 16-17, 2009, in Denver, Colorado. Is it a workshop or is it a summit? What happens when cable companies in the U.S. and Canada along with 30 geospatial providers come together for two days of focused discussions to bring awareness to the location dimension of business?  

“Location intelligence is a business enabler that drives business value, and an industry-wide GIS focus is needed in Cable to reach across all of the different business functions,” said Keely Buchanan, Communications Manager for the Time Warner Cable Geographic Business Intelligence. GIS is a geographical information system that consists of software, hardware, data, and resources that enable an organization to extract location intelligence from internal and external data. Each cable company has embarked on a GIS project in some form over the years, which creates a geospatially referenced information infrastructure that can be leveraged by different parts of the organization. However, now as location intelligence becomes increasingly critical to all aspects of the cable business beyond engineering and construction, there’s a need to bring greater attention to the location dimension of the business: getting started, embracing it, optimizing it, improving the cable business and customer service, and determining what kinds of standards are needed for GIS and location intelligence to grow within cable.  

Attendees will include a cross-section from the cable industry, including engineering and marketing. This is a two-day workshop that is open to vendors and the public on Day 1. Day 1 will include presentations from CableLabs on Go2Broadand and the Broadband Network Service, the cable companies on their serviceability and customer care tools that rely on location intelligence, and 6 geospatial services providers—ESRI, PA Consulting, CADTEL, Primus Geographics, GE Smallworld, and Spatial Info. Approximately 20 companies were invited to submit abstracts, 8 submitted abstracts for consideration, and the six presenting companies were selected based on available presentation slots, value for the audience, and solutions they have deployed in the cable industry.

Day 2 is a closed session for the cable companies to share their experiences, best practices, and lessons learned on their GIS initiatives and in particular to focus on the business objectives, requirements, and needs with geospatial providers that have been serving the cable industry in the US and Canada. The momentum from this summit will continue with the “Executive Level GIS Technology Overview” at the SCTE conference October 29, 2009.

Chris Nelson of TimeWarner Cable loves to fish and believes in teaching people how to fish. He also loves GIS and bringing people together to discuss the power of GIS. He will be kicking off the summit and covering GIS 101, the 2009 workshop, and GIS ROI. We had an opportunity to speak with the individuals responsible for implementing the location intelligence vision within their respective companies and they had the following to say about the drivers for location intelligence, the challenges, and the future of GIS in cable.

David Agranoff Senior Software Architect Cable Information Services	James Pierce Senior Director HFC Engineering & GIS, Charter	Sean Bristol Director or Engineering and Construction Comcast Washington Region	Neal Nakamura Engineering IT manager, TimeWarner Cable-Hawaii	Chris Nelson Time Warner Cable
What is driving location intelligence (GIS) in your organization?
Initial interest stems around Go2Broadband, which is the cable industry’s web-based serviceability tool that allows customers to type in their address and identify the cable operators that could service their home. It is based on a zipcode+4 approach, which doesn’t capture all potential customers, which means that some areas can’t be serviced by G2B. Serviceability from a G2B perspective for residential video, phone, high-speed data perspective and perhaps more importantly today, the roll out of commercial business services are the main drivers.	The accuracy of addresses impacts operations and marketing campaigns. At an average ARPU of $99, getting the addresses wrong adds up to a lot of lost revenue. Our 2nd project, which was built upon a clean standardized billing system service address, was a residential serviceability tool that we launched last year that allows us to quickly correlate the cable network plant boundary to a potential customer to determine if they can be serviced within our plant footprint. This doesn’t sound like a big deal, but before GIS, this was done manually, and with GIS, it has saved us a lot of money. In February we launched a commercial serviceability tool to support Charter Business, which is changing the way the Charter Business sales and marketing teams are doing business because now they know where the plant is relative to potential customers and as a result the commercial services group has seen 20% growth quarter over quarter through 2nd quarter 2009.	The need for standardized tools and approaches of looking at the business on the OSS side; 1) OSS – how do we quickly see and correlate impacts to customers, 2) how to use the mapping technology to see what’s going on in the business from a technical perspective; 3) focus on homes passed records, where actual customers are vs. homes passed regarding serviceability.	Operations is the driving force behind GIS in our organization because GIS is attached to so many different operational issues/operational groups—maintenance, billing systems, nodes, CSR, dispatch, field operations, digital phone, one call (call before you dig), design and construction, serviceability. The most common internal (Engineering & Construction) usage is project management/change management. The most common external usage is for maintenance: Field Operations, Customer Service, Dispatch, & Technical Support. GIS-derived tools include a 10 customer granularity automated outage detection/location system, automated fiber break locator, account-level map displays of set top box and cable modem performance measurements.	There is a genuine need for the technology in the business. Within every business unit there is an opportunity to improve performance, a need for more accurate metrics, and improved processes. For example, within our industry, homes passed is a critical metric that rolls up into finance, marketing, engineering, everywhere. Marketing needs to know where their targets are—they already know the “what” and “why” about their markets.
When was GIS introduced into your organization?
Location analysis is critical to determining serviceability and therefore the core element of Go2Broadband,which was launched in the summer of 2000.	We’ve been using GIS for 3 years and we first got started with a billing system scrub and standardizing of service addresses.	10 years ago. Comcast Washington is the result of several acquisitions over that period.	GIS was brought into the organization in 1998 to design the cable plant and document the coax. There were 5 engineering offices, geographically spread out across the Hawaiian islands. In 2000, we implemented a GIS web connection system that enabled access by the neighbor island offices as well as conversion services from the Denver TWC engineering office. A light-weight web viewer was installed in 2003 for general purpose applications.	3 years ago. Jim Ludington, our EVP, saw the potential benefit that GIS could bring to our industry and has championed GIS at TWC from the beginning.
Is your GIS homegrown?
We currently do not use a GIS to do the location analysis, but we are interested in moving in that direction. Visualization of the data on a map has not been a useful technique for CableLabs in a federated serviceability model.  However, MSOs can make important decisions about serviceability with the aid of visualization on a case by case basis.	Our system is based on several off-the-shelf as well as popular industry deployed applications, Oracle 10g spatial database, Pitney Bowes Geocoding and Parcel data, as well as Google, TelaAtlas and NAVTEQ mapping software.	Home grown based on Oracle Spatial, Autodesk, Spatial info, ESRI, and MapInfo. ESRI and MapInfo are reporting tools not the system per se.	Our system is based on CADTEL, Oracle database, ESRI’s ArcSDE, and Autocad. There is a sizeable homegrown component in custom features, attributes, VBA utilities and web service functions.	There isn’t a comprehensive GIS that meets all the business needs without extensive additional programming and add-ons. We have found that building a hybrid platform GIS lets us take advantage of the best functionality from each off-the-shelf product.
Size of Department
We don’t have a formal GIS department. The CIS (Cable Information Systems) team is addressing many different issues, and GIS is another source of information that can improve the cable business.	3 people in the corporate HFC Engineering and GIS department, plus contractors and developers with whom we have developed a multi-year, multi-company relationship	We have a team of 11 people working on GIS.	We have a small department that consists of 1 manager, 1 DBA/OS administrator and 3 others; The GIS dept is a tool maintenance group that performs network hardware upkeep, land base updates, data grooming plus fiber management. Primary data input is performed by the design engineers.	The GIS team is comprised of 10 internal folks and several contractors with about 85 dedicated staffers across the business functions.
Cost of Implementation
N/A	Our implementation costs were under $3 million including the software and implementation costs—every project had an ROI: 2 months on the Commercial serviceability tool; 6 months on Residential serviceability tool; and 1 year on fiber management tool.	Implementation costs were $10 million over the last ten years across Viacom, ATT, and now Comcast.	Under $1 million. The biggest cost was the data conversion of paper maps to digital maps. We saved a lot of money in making agreements with the 4 counties to share the landbase data. The City of Honolulu has an advanced GIS and has pushed for cooperation with the utilities and communications companies.	An enterprise class GIS is a multi-million dollar endeavor for a company the size of TWC—40,000 users across the enterprise and 300,000 miles of cable plant across the country. But, smaller companies and even larger companies can build a lot of value by looking at shorter term, more strategic objectives with considerably less funding. Look at what Comcast and Charter have done along those lines for really good examples of this.
What new KPIs are emerging from location intelligence?
N/A	On the franchise side, clean, accurately geocoded addresses are resulting in more accurate tax payments. Before, if an address was wrongly coded to a Franchise Tax Authority (FTA), then we would be over-paying the wrong municipality, thus underpaying the correct municipality. In one particular municipality, the over-payment was close to $200K.	Washington is still the #1 market in Comcast. It continues to outperform every other market in Comcast’s power ranking. I believe that the data intelligence attributed to GIS is critical to this distinction. GIS is critical to intelligent data and managing by intelligent data instead of speculation. We need an integrated GIS system to cut the data in multiple ways. We have 105 lines of KPIs that cuts the business into different aspects—P&L, to entity, regional level—homes passed, cost for miles produced, projected run rates, Serviceability: how performing against total calls in.	Every time you spin off a new app from GIS you have a new KPI. For example: by connecting our new detection monitoring system to GIS, we were able to create a proactive tool to respond to customers during an outage. This resulted in fewer customer calls. Due to the granularity of the information available from this integrated system, we are credited with customer service improvement—we score within the top 3 in customer service within the region, with an average 40% less downtime for network reliability, and corresponding truck rolls. With the ability to connect the GIS with operations and outage management, when customers call we already know about it. The KPI is the performance of the customer service department.	Existing KPIs can be improved with GIS. For example: homes passed data originally involved running a few macros against the billing data; or a query of homes passed against the divisions - spreadsheets, emails, and access tables getting lumped together into a final report. When GIS is hooked into other business units, homes passed numbers become very accurate because they are associated with location. New KPIs—in terms of forecasting—a GIS creates a foundational dataset for commercial service planners that allows them to determine where to extend the market. With the ability to trend information over time and take a past, present, future view of the GIS information, we can look at future markets and forecast where to go and why. This results in significantly improved penetration rates, accurate build-out cost estimates, and optimized market targeting. Running new cable is an expensive proposition—so we need to be careful. Forecasting and planning is critical.
What will you be presenting at the summit?
I will be discussing G2B and the GIS connection to ensure that we reach all serviceable residences and businesses.	I’ll be talking about Charter's Commercial serviceability tool. I’ll also cover Charter’s GIS history and why Charter’s experience is different from TWC and Comcast.	I’ll talk about the Past, Present, and Future of GIS Comcast Washington. In particular my focus will be on data standards, not necessarily the GIS tools. The tools are fun and fancy, but the core issue is the data. Additionally, I’ll address the importance of a cable industry data model.	The Monitor System discussed above—because of its ROI and the impact on customer service, and Wireless backhaul management. In the OSP (outside plant) world—where you are is everything. The wireless backhaul business is complicated with many construction issues. With GIS, 100-150 sites can be assessed in a matter of hours.	Last year I spoke on ROI for commercial and digital phone. This year I’m doing a GIS 101 to set the stage for the rest of the conference and the other MSOs to discuss their experiences. This workshop is all about sharing what we’ve learned. So, I also spend the entire day on my feet, answering more specific questions for folks who are looking to take advantage of what GIS can do for their business.
Where do you see location intelligence going in your organization or the cable industry?
Other areas that GIS can be helpful to cable would include serviceability and plant management on the wireless side as that gets rolled out, as a correlation engine to correlate many points of data or feedback from the network and customers, which connects diagnostics with appropriate deployment of resources, and Advanced Advertising.	Every cable operator is structured differently. The question of whether they are centralized or decentralized will have an impact on the extent to which GIS in integrated across the enterprise.	The era of the IT lock down--where everything is controlled from a system perspective—is over. IT no longer needs to be involved to build a database. Business groups can now develop what they need. Business groups are developing tools that service the business. Although they are still tightly integrated with IT, it is a business unit developing it. GIS is just another technology we use; we are still in an early part of the evolution, but with dotNet and SOA, the technology is getting to the point where the great visions of the past are now realistic. How we view and use the data is growing exponentially.	GIS is going deeper into the organization as it gets embedded deeper into the system. Location will provide the common denominator for human associations that take a long time. GIS is about getting the team working better than the sum of the parts.	GIS is a behind the scenes business enabler that is hooked into all parts of the business and it will bring new and critical insights to managing and growing the business.

The cable companies are all at different levels of maturity in leveraging location intelligence and using GIS as the infrastructure to support these efforts. The presenters will discuss their many successes as well as their continuing challenges. Some challenges include:

• Working with limited resources - For Charter, the biggest challenges are delivering ready-for-use applications with external resources, and having to depend on other departmental internal resources for success.
• Workflow integration - The true power of GIS will be unleashed only when it is integrated into day-to-day operations across the company. At Time Warner Cable workflow integration remains an issue. Cable companies by their nature are mavericks, very fast moving and aggressive, so there is a need to demonstrate immediate and incremental returns to senior management before the GIS nirvana is realized, in order to justify continued investment in this critical business information infrastructure.
• Technical - maintaining the synchronization with billing, set top and modem control systems with respect to network changes is still a big challenge for the Hawaii division of Time Warner Cable. In cable, everything has to happen fast—which requires improved synchronization between systems.
• Data - Sean Bristol at Comcast believes that data is the biggest challenge. There is little commonality between any of the Cable MSO’s and even within each MSO and therefore little commonality in the data and data process, which are key components to having enterprise GIS functionality.
• Cost - The industry is always battling the past. Management is skeptical of big information management projects. GIS has been a costly proposition with unfortunately several failed attempts over the years, like many failed IT projects – no ROI has been shown. As a result, there hasn’t been enough focus on the business applications of GIS. The challenge is balancing the short-term, immediate needs of the business against the long-term enterprise development efforts.

The key messages these presenters hope to convey are:

• Location Intelligence/GIS technology is a business enabler, and is being used to drive business value. It creates another dimension with the ability to connect anything by location.
• Business leaders need to get involved to drive the value of location intelligence across the enterprise.
• You can accomplish a lot with a small team and limited resources if you have a roadmap. If you don’t know the data, quality, source, migration and plan for migration, then whoever you buy the software/services from will charge you half a million dollars on the data step because they will impose their data model.
• Trying to find commonality where the cable industry can get to standards; the providers will hopefully be listening as well as talking. The people attending the conference can make common specifications succeed. In the cable industry it is always advantageous to have the specification developed before the executives get involved and drive more momentum. A specification around addresses and a common data structure would make integrating GIS much easier across the cable industry.

The conference is being hosted by the Cable Center, the educational arm of the cable industry, which is located on the University of Denver Campus in Denver, Colorado. “This workshop would really not be possible without the sponsorship support of the Cable Center and our platinum sponsor ESRI,” said Keely Buchanan.