A comprehensive focus on business process integration is one of the best ways of staying ahead of competition and is the key to continued business success.

GIS is a key business component that enables adding new dimensions to the way organizations traditionally managed or operated their systems. Organizations are moving away from traditional GIS applications to specific spatial tied applications specially with day-to-day operational applications such as Outage Management Systems (OMS), Work Management Systems (WMS) and Mobile dispatch. Reducing redundancy of data, increasing transparency within the organization, automation and efficiency are the key benefits.

The most opted path for an enterprise GIS is point-to-point integration by developing direct interfaces between the systems to be integrated. This approach requires substantial efforts as the number of applications increase and there may be concerns over data integrity. The other method is using an Integration Bus methodology.

GIS as a technology has matured today; and most technology vendors target specific market verticals. Progressive application areas now use GIS across a broad range of inventory, analysis and management functions and, consequently, across many different departments within the same organization. However, this trend also reflects the fact that users are increasingly looking for tailor-made and streamlined solutions to their work. Historically, AM/FM/GIS, Outage Management, and SCADA have all been separate applications but we are seeing a trend for these systems to merge onto a common platform.

To really integrate the various business processes in an enterprise, all the functionality needs to be accessed anywhere, anytime by authorized persons. Rapid advances in internet technology, wireless communications and mobile computing are beginning to enable this. The aim is to write an application once and run it anywhere, not to re-implement cut down versions of desktop applications on limited field units.