Patrick Bonk
Hunter Sparks
The workers who provide clean drinking water and the conveyance and treatment of our sewage are critical to maintaining civil infrastructure. They deserve the best technology and tools to make them more productive and collaborative, but they are often hamstrung by organizational limitations.
With the right tools, domain experts can grow a knowledge base repository and pass their domain expertise to the next generation of water engineers. Having domain knowledge at decision-makers’ fingertips can help every organization adapt quickly to environmental changes and new regulations.
Spreading the domain knowledge
A domain expert on water loss analysis who has been solving technical issues for years using a variety of data sources is a goldmine for a water utility. The challenge is spreading their knowledge to the rest of the organization. Templates can help:
- Templates provide a foundation for engineering domain experts to create analytic workflows, make changes, and add variables based on their local systems and desired results.
- Templates are customizable, ranging from simple mathematical processes to more complex analytics incorporating multiple data streams.
- Templates help automate workflows and analyze treatment plant processes and networks by providing ready-to-run expressions.
When domain expertise is captured and templatized, less experienced or non-technical staff can reuse it. This capability is integrated into Info360 Plant and Info360 Insight, so the templates are accessible to everyone in the organization, although they can also be limited to specific users based on authorization rules. These administrative options add a lot of flexibility and control.
Sharing inside and out
Because these are web-based SaaS apps, these templates can easily be shared with external partners such as Engineering Service Providers, either by granting them access or sending them a view-only URL. Analytic expressions captured in templates can also flow in the other direction, from partners into a utility’s Info360 template library to be used by staff when local domain expertise is lacking.
This is how consultants can utilize the Info360 cloud-based apps, establishing a library of templates for workers to use and modify:
- Engineers pick templates from the template library, like an Alkalinity Consumed expression, and adapt it using different data sources for their respective area of a treatment plant or network.
- The updated version can be saved as a new template and added to a common workspace for reuse and sharing.
- Administrators of Info360 Plant and Info360 Insight (consultants or in-house) control which templates can be shared and to whom, providing appropriate levels of security.
- Actionable reports on the results of the analytic template provide snapshots of operations based on real-time data.
Less futzing with spreadsheets, more decision making
Because everyone is using the same data, the Analytic Template Library addresses the issue of relying on outdated datasets, which is all too common when teams rely on stand-alone tools or spreadsheets. The goal is to make the sharing of real-time data across job roles, sites, and organizations a part of the daily workflow, so managing projects is more efficient and staff can be more responsive to issues as they arise.
The availability of templates also accelerates the training and upskilling of new employees to enable digital sampling of current conditions. Complex data can be augmented with visual graphics, maps, and live data so everyone can visualize, measure, and inform their colleagues about the water/wastewater network and plant performance.
Do you have any data-scientist water unicorns in your organization waiting to be discovered? You should nurture their talent. Read how no-code and low-code analytics can help your domain experts create a data-driven culture.
With the ability to share data and context in pre-configured analytic templates that work with real-time data, the Info360 Analytic Template Library grows with every bit of captured knowledge, enabling other engineers to perform complex monitoring and troubleshooting tasks.
As challenges continue to mount at water utilities in communities worldwide, it’s essential to capture domain expertise into knowledge systems that staff and managers can use to provide customers with safe and clean water sources while proactively managing water networks. Info360 Insight and Info360 Plant are designed to assist domain experts in leveraging their experience to help the entire organization improve service delivery, maximize business resources, and rapidly manage incident responses.