Enabling Real-Time Information: Bridging The Dark Data Gap

By Christa Campbell

In our increasingly digital world, utilities have greater access to real-time information on the operating conditions, performance, and health of their infrastructure. This enables more efficient operations and better-informed planning decisions, more proactive response to network events, and more preventive or predictive maintenance of critical assets. Data can come from a wide range of sources—field applications, SCADA platforms, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, automatic vehicle location (AVL) systems, weather forecasts, and social media. This large amount of data can be overwhelming, quickly becoming dark data—data that is gathered and stored, often in departmental silos, but not used in any meaningful way.