In February 2026 Norsk Vann published report 300, written by Sweco with a steering group of municipalities: Veien til økt digital modenhet i kommunal VA-virksomhet. It adapts the Norwegian Digitalisation Agency's method "Orden i eget hus" to water and wastewater in seven steps: plan, prioritise, map, assess access, describe, make available, and govern. For each step it describes maturity levels from 0 to 4, and it comes with an Excel tool to score a utility's own level.
What steps 3 and 5 ask for
Step 3, mapping, asks for a complete overview of which datasets a utility has, where they are and how they are used. Step 5, describing, asks for clear descriptions (metadata), so that others can understand and use the data. The report says plainly why: without a good description, datasets are vulnerable to depending on particular people, and hard to reuse, for colleagues, for successors and for anyone outside. Its lowest level for describing, in our translation: knowledge of content, units and interpretation sits mainly in the heads of individuals, and much of the understanding disappears when key people leave.
Where that bites in the control system
A waterworks' control system holds thousands of readings with names like 31TT0231.PV. What each one measures, in which unit and on which machine, is often written in a drawing nobody has updated, or known only to the people who set it up. That is the dataset where mapping and describing are hardest, and where the cost of not doing it arrives when someone retires.
What can be done from the exports alone
Auge reads the exports the control system already makes, on a machine inside the fence, and writes the mapping report: every tag with its quantity, unit and machine and the evidence for each; the tags it could not place, each with the reason, for a person on site to answer; and the readings whose data went wrong this week. That is a description of the operating data, and a list of what still needs a person. How often it is right, and where it is not, is measured and published.
Two more things come with it. The tag list as a spreadsheet, one row per tag, for the Excel template the report suggests a municipality starts its descriptions in. And the overflow readings checked year by year, read again at full resolution: how much of each year is there, the longest holes with dates, where a reading froze, and for an on/off signal how many times the overflow started. Facts from the files, before a year is reported; no volume is computed, and nothing is said about whether a report meets a requirement.
A requirement for the next control system tender
The report also says that good descriptions can be set as a requirement for deliveries from system suppliers. A suggestion for the text, to adapt: At handover, and after every later change, the supplier delivers the tag list as a spreadsheet, with for each tag its name, what it measures, its unit, its range, the machine or structure it belongs to, and whether the value is measured, calculated or a setpoint. The list is the client's property. A read-only check of the exports before and after an upgrade then shows what was renamed, lost or added.
What it does not cover
Only the data in the exports. Not the pipe network or asset registers, not customer data, and not the other five steps, which are the utility's own work: deciding what matters, who may see what, and how the overview is kept up to date. A report does not raise a utility's maturity by itself; it gives the people doing that work a place to start that is not a blank spreadsheet.
Waterworks that produce at least 2,000 m³ a day must also know their systems under the Digital Security Act (Mattilsynet). The mapping report is a basis for that inventory. It does not make anyone compliant; the duties are the waterworks'.