Real Benefits - Advancing GIS Technology
Why Technology Advancement?
The original SPLASH system had already been excessively slow, and the system experienced significant periods of down time. The net result was that the backlog that everyone was working so hard to eliminate, continued to grow. We tried extra shifts and overtime to no avail. With the advent of the new enterprise database and all of the requirements it placed on managing the integrity of the data for critical business applications, it became apparent that the production could be slowed down by a crippling 500°/0. We were in IT crisis. A tremendous investment had already been made in GIS data, hardware, applications, and people skills. We now were looking at having to scrap the whole program.
At the same time, the utility had ongoing challenges managing their network infrastructure. This was due in part to the rapid population growth that the San Diego community has had to endure for many years. Some problems occurred that received significant attention from the community and the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Due to these problems, the EPA required that San Diego Water Utilities have the integrated work order and asset management system (SWIM) and the enterprise GIS database (SPLASH H) in production late in 1996.
Here we were, in January of 1996, faced with EPA deadlines, stifling decreases in user productivity and pressure from onlookers to scrap all the hard work that had been done over the last five years. It was time to look seriously at technology advancement. San Diego Water Utilities and our information technology provider, San Diego Data Processing Corporation, went down two concurrent paths to address the tough issues we needed to face. First, we actively engaged our existing GIS vendor to work with us to try to resolve the technological problems we were having. We also started to look at new solutions that had entered the marketplace since we first began our program back in the early 1990s.
Getting the vendors involved proved to be a very effective way to quickly determine whether or not we could solve the technological problems we were facing. We set up a benchmark with Smallworld Systems, Inc., of Englewood, Colorado to prototype our system and demonstrate how to solve key technical problems related to data migration, data modeling, database management, and plotting performance.
The prototype went amazing well. In just two weeks, we were able to address all the problems that had been plaguing us for several years. And we also were able to chart out a path forward to migrate existing data and applications to a new technology environment that relied on our strategic platforms of Windows NT and Oracle.
As part of our commitment to our existing GIS vendor, we extended a similar offer to meet the same benchmark requirements over a sixty-day period. At the end of this period, we realized that many of our objectives could not be achieved with the technologies we had been using, and it was necessary to rapidly begin to migrate to our new system. The deadlines were closing in!
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