Critigen

Critigen: The Critical Infrastructure Dimension

Posted: Dec 15, 2009

By Natasha Léger, LBx Journal
December 15, 2009

FEATURING JEFF AKERS, CEO; REMY ALLIS, VP GLOBAL MARKETING; MIKE UNDERWOOD, SVP GLOBAL SALES

LBx: Tell us a little about Critigen.
Critigen: Critigen has its roots in engineering and critical infrastructure as a spinoff of CH2M HILL. The EMS (Enterprise Management Services) Group, which provided the IT consulting services to support CH2M HILL’s customers, is now an independent company named Critigen. The ESS (Enterprise Spatial Solutions) Group was part of EMS. Now, as an independent company, we are the world’s largest privately-held geospatial consultancy, and we serve nine sectors within critical infrastructure, including Defense, Finance, Water, Government, Energy, Transportation, Emergency, Facilities, and Commercial.

LBx: What types of problems do you solve for your customers?
Critigen: We focus on the entire lifecycle of critical infrastructure, which includes planning, designing, building, operating and managing. Economic, social and geo-political factors are driving critical infrastructure stakeholders to address climate change, energy independence and security concerns. We help our clients address capital program management, infrastructure development and modernization, carbon management, energy transformation, asset management, and land and facilities management. Helping cities across the U. S. to encourage and enable solar energy usage, providing asset management and maintenance organizations with easy-to–use, map-based work order systems, and helping the defense community to conduct wide-scale master planning for base relocation and consolidation are a few real-life examples.

LBx: Jeff, in one of your speeches I heard you talk about moving GIS from the basement to the board room. What did you mean by that?
Critigen: As you know, location data are critical to information management across the enterprise. To date, GIS has been a technology for analysts, not for managers. Moving GIS/location intelligence into the board room is about leveraging location data throughout the organization—integrating it into workflows, data management, and business processes so that the C-level is equipped with the advantage of this data to better manage the organization. This means that managers have to be able to visualize needed data and collaborate on the data, in order to effectively manage with the data. When managers can do those three things without having to ask a database analyst or GIS analyst to run a report or translate the findings, then location intelligence is a mainstream decision support tool.

LBx: The Big 4 consulting firms have tried GIS/location integration before and failed, due to high costs and long implementation timelines. Why is Critigen uniquely positioned to succeed where others have failed?
Critigen: All firms go to market with their biases and their business models. The spatial/location piece has traditionally been devalued in information management systems because it was difficult and because it was hard to justify the ROI. Critigen is uniquely positioned because, with our engineering heritage, we deal with location data on a daily basis. It is integral to the engineering lifecycle. In addition, critical infrastructure is our area of expertise. So we have the domain knowledge in both location and critical infrastructure—this is our core competency. We already understand the lifecycle of the data and how it needs to be integrated across silos.

Our other advantage is that we own the entire technology stack around business process integration and location. There are a number of business processes that can be optimized for location intelligence, including CRM (customer relationship management), ERP (enterprise resource planning, SCM (supply chain management)… Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, we have developed what we believe is the first enterprise architecture for spatial integration, which means that we don’t have to guess at the implementation.

LBx: Cost is always a concern when it comes to an enterprise integration project. We understand that you have been outsourcing IT and GIS departments for cities. Can you tell us how that works?
Critigen: CH2M HILL has been the leader in outsourcing for cities. In particular in the case of spin-away cities and newly created cities, establishing a new bureaucratic infrastructure is expensive. Critigen manages the IT and GIS services for a medium sized municipality for under $50,000 a year for an initial engagement. This includes two full ESRI licenses and turnkey GIS solution, including management of the data. This is an attractive service for municipalities, not only because it is cost-effective, but more importantly because it turns CAPEX (capital expenditures) into OPEX (operational expenditures) We think this is an attractive model for businesses as well.

LBx: What is the most important thing people should know about modernizing critical infrastructure?
Critigen: That it is a significant global initiative that addresses the most important challenges we face on the planet: lowering energy consumption, driving economic growth and job creation, cleaning up the earth and providing a secure and healthy environment for people to live and thrive.