Providing a new level of Customer Satisfaction – How we made GIS Work at the Las Virgenes Municipal Water District

Providing a new level of Customer Satisfaction – How we made GIS Work at the Las Virgenes Municipal Water District

C. Eugene Talmadge, R.A.
Planning Administrator
Las Virgenes Municipal Water District
4232 Las Virgenes Road
Calabasas, CA 91302-1994
Phone: 818-251-2128
Fax: 818-251-2159
E-mail: gtalmadge@lvmwd.dst.ca.us

Robert W. Finkle
President
IT Nexus, Inc.
10129 W. Dartmouth, Suite 9304
Lakewood, Colorado 80227
Phone: 720-962-0595
Fax: 720-962-0561
E-mail: rwfinkle@it-nexus.com

Getting GIS off the “back burner”

Recognizing The Need
The Las Virgenes Municipal Water District (LVMWD) is a small to medium sized water/wastewater utility the serving 122 square miles in the western portion of unincorporated Los Angeles County and including the cities of Calabasas, Hidden Hills, Agoura Hills and Westlake Village for potable and recycled water services. The wastewater treatment service area also includes portions of eastern Ventura County in southern California. LVMWD provide water and sewer service to a population of approximately 65,000, it maintains its own sewer treatment plant, and it provides recycled water for irrigation within its 122 square mile service area.

By early 1990’s, some senior staff at the District were convinced that LVMWD needed to implement GIS. They had learned enough about GIS technology to be convinced that it would provide a significantly better tool for performing many of the mapping and information management tasks that were central to the utility’s planning, demand management, and facility operations.

The District did not have in-house capability to perform hydraulic modeling and relied on consulting engineering support for that planning function. Operations and planning staff were constantly struggling with ways to present their modeling results to managers and the Board of Directors. Further, the hydraulic model being utilized was “static” in nature and could not adequately address dynamics of changing operational scenarios. There were other limitations on the hydraulic modeling including the inability of the system to relate changes in land uses with resulting water demands. Finally, it did not provide an easy method for overlaying the pipeline system on a base map.

Figure 1 Las Virgenes Municipal Water District’s Service Area
LVMWD also needed better tools to support aggressive water conservation programs they were mandated to perform within their region. They needed better tools to analyze and thematically map trends and variations in water consumption within its 30,000 parcels. In addition, District staff needed relatively detailed land use information with which to analyze, design and plot individual irrigation plans for the many large land estates that exist with the District’s service area.
Finally, senior staff realized that taking steps to integrate the District’s many diverse sources of information would pay dividends in allowing staff to work more efficiently. Using GIS technology would allow staff to catch up with back-logged work and, most importantly, to maintain the District’s high standards of customer service by allowing quick access to accurate and reliable facility infrastructure information in response to customer calls.
Convincing Management and the Board
Although senior staff recognized that GIS could provide the District with real and lasting benefits, the opportunity was not nearly so clear in the minds of the District’s managers and its Board of Directors. With some investigation it was learned that their lack of enthusiasm was attributable largely to a lack of understanding of what GIS was and how it could serve the District. So in the middle 1990’s the Planning Administrator began an aggressive process of education, advocacy and consensus building.

First, the Planning Administrator started to spend time with the senior staff and managers of each of the District’s divisions, briefing them on GIS technology. While this initially took the form of discussions on what GIS was, it evolved over time to briefings on what GIS could do for the District and why the District should implement GIS. This effort continues on a frequent basis now that the District is implementing GIS, Routine briefings are conducted that inform managers and the board on the status and accomplishments of the GIS program.

Second, individuals were encouraged to attend presentations sponsored by the several GIS professional organizations that were active in Southern California. The information gathered during these sessions was brought back to the District and efforts were made to make sure staff, managers, and the Board received periodic briefings on GIS developments in the water industry.

A third factor of importance occurred in 1995 when funding was approved for the hiring of a consultant to perform a GIS needs assessment and feasibility study. The hiring of the District’s GIS consultant and preparing the needs assessment was a real turning point for LVMWD’s program. The needs assessment involved all of the District’s divisions and played a significant role in building enthusiasm for the project and documenting the District’s GIS needs, a GIS system concept and preparing an overall budget for GIS development.

With the preparation of the needs assessment, the Planning Administrator had a vehicle with which to increase his advocacy and to prepare an implementation budget request that was supported by management contingent on the approval of the District’s Board. To achieve this final and critical step, the District sought the assistance of its GIS consultant. The GIS consultant was asked to prepare a presentation to the Board that provided an executive summary of the GIS needs assessment findings and recommendations and allowed the Board to ask questions and to get answers to any of their concerns. The preparation work performed by the District prior to the Board meeting, combined with the skills of an experienced consultant, won the day in the Board room and funding for the GIS project was approved.

Implemention with a focus on early results

A Phased Program Budget
The District’s approved budget for implementing GIS was $1,038,600 to be expended over a 3-4 year time period. An overall budget breaks down is presented in Table 1.

Table 1 LVMWD’s GIS Implementation Budget

Expenditure Category	Budget	Actual
1. Consulting (database design, custom applications)	$248,600	$283,000
2. Hardware Acquisition	$85,000	$20,000*
3. Software Acquisition	$55,000	$15,000
4. Database Development
- Base Mapping	$80,000	$40,000
- Pilot Study Data Conversion	-	$85,000
- Contracted Data Conversion	$450,000	$550-600,000
- In-house Data Conversion	$75,000	$25,000*
5. Training	$45,000	$45,000*
Total	$1,038,600	$1,063,000 - 1,113,000*
*Estimated costs. Other district funds have been used for some acquisitions that benefit district network applications and GIS program)

Although the Board had approved a multi-year budget, the District’s implementation team knew that on-going support for the program relied on achieving early results. To this end, we worked with our consultant to define a system development plan focused on the early delivery of GIS capabilities.

We knew that the development of the water and sewer system databases would take a relatively long time to accomplish, so did not want to wait on the completion of these databases before showing results. We decided to first focus on establishing a base map and implementing a few key applications that would be visible to our Board.

In general terms, we decided to phase our implementation as follows:

Developing and Maintaining the Base Map
An issue confronted by all water utilities is that they need an up-to-date base map but their primary business has little to do with updating the base map – they are base map information users but they are not base map maintainers. Some water utilities “bite the bullet” and hire the staff needed to perform base map maintenance, while other water utilities make arrangements with local city or county agencies to receive periodic updates to their base map.

Since the majority of LVMWD’s service area was in Los Angeles County, our early plan had considered purchasing the county’s base map and then receiving periodic updates. Upon investigation, however, we learned of a third-party company that serves as a valued-added broker of the county’s base map information. The company provides a subscription service that provides an integrated map database of parcels, easements, street rights-of-way, Thomas Brothers map information, assessor and other County public works information and real estate ownership data with annual updates for approximately $40,000 per year for the District’s service area (and buffer areas as well). LVMWD elected to use the subscription service because it delivered an immediately useable base map and allowed us to avoid the hiring of additional staff to perform base map maintenance.

Showing Results
Achieving early success in acquiring a base map allowed us to move quickly in developing several key applications that are highly visible and that provide real value to the District. During the early years of our GIS implementation program we feel these applications played an important role in showing early results. Particularly effective applications that we developed during this early time period included:

1. Board of Directors Division Boundary Map. For this application product we combined information collected from the registrar of votes with our base map to prepare maps and data summaries of registered votes within the geographic divisions represented by each of our Board members. This application product allowed our Board members to see the power of the GIS and its ability to quickly produce information of real relevance to their view of the world.

2. Development Activity Tracking. As a regional entity, LVMWD has responsibility for tracking land development activity and periodically reporting this information to the local governments within its service area. Early in our program we developed a tracking application that allowed us to prepare maps and data reports of the status of development activity within our region. We now routinely provide this information to the governmental agencies in our service area, including the cities of Calabasas, Agora Hills, West Lake Village and Hidden Hills.

3. Sewer Annexation Tracking. LVMWD tracks new developments to determine if they are occurring in areas where sewer infrastructure had been built using bond funding. When new development occurs within these areas, fees must be calculated and assessed for the repayment of bonds by these new customers. Before GIS, this task had been a research-intensive process that required a fair amount of time and effort. With the development of this application, were we able to show to the District’s management and Board how GIS can create real work efficiencies and improve the District’s effectiveness in capturing revenues.

Expanding the System to serve the Enterprise

Current Status and System Integration Goals
Currently, LVMWD has completed Phase 1 of its GIS development program. This has included the development of the base map, the implementation of early applications, and the performance of a water and sewer system data conversion pilot. We are in the process of preparing a bidding document with which we will hire a data conversion firm to complete our water and sewer system data conversion during January/February of next year.

With the completion of our water and sewer system data conversion, we will move into the 3 rd phase of our GIS program that will focus on achieving several key system integration goals. A primary goal will be to achieve a data-sharing interface between our Customer Information System (currently Orcom) and the GIS. This important point of integration will allows us to collect and analyze water use data in support of our conservation program. It will also us to quickly respond to customer information requests by providing a link between our customer database and our GIS facility database.

Another system integration priority at the District is achieving tighter data integration between the GIS and our hydraulic model. We are currently working with Haestad Methods (an older version of Cybernet was used and integrated with the GIS base map when the district updated its Potable and Recycled Water Facilities Master Plans in 1999) to explore the best approach for sharing data between these two information systems. We anticipate that with a tighter integration between the GIS and the hydraulic model we will improve our ability to update the hydraulic model, increase our ability to generate and analyze alternative system improvement scenarios, and enhance our ability to display and report the results of our water modeling.

Building an appropriate GIS Support Environment
An important aspect of the success of our current GIS operation as well as our GIS expansion program is the development and maintenance of an institutional support environment. At LVMWD we have achieved this through two primary mechanisms: 1) establishing the institutional responsibilities to ensure the GIS is properly administered and 2) providing for routine, on-going training.

Establishing Institutional Support
At the District we have split the responsibilities for administering the GIS between two primary divisions. Responsibility for maintaining the network and performing database and system administration is assigned to our IS Group that is also responsible for administering the District’s office LAN/WAN and Customer Information System.

The technical administration and maintenance of the GIS is performed by 5 LVMWD staff assigned to the Planning division. The Planning Administrator is serving as the overall GIS Manager. The District’s GIS “Guru” is a Civil Engineering Associate and has received extensive training at the software vendor’s training facilities.. GIS database updates and day-to-day use of the GIS program are performed by two Drafting Technicians.. The final user is the Civil Engineering Assistant whose responsibilities deal primarily with district real estate functions (easements, rights-of –way and the like).

What is notable about this institutional arrangement is that the District has not attempted to formally create a separate GIS Division. Instead, our view has been the GIS should be directly integrated into the on-going work functions of the District. The “pre-GIS” roles and responsibilities of these 5 individuals have not substantially changed. In the case of the Planning Administrator and the Civil Engineering Assistant, GIS responsibilities have been added to their previous work functions. In the case of the 3 individuals who perform GIS database updates, their work methods have been altered from using manual techniques or Computer Aided Drafting (CAD) to using the GIS to perform map and data updates.

Providing On-going Training
The District has also made a conscious commitment to providing on-going training, but it has done so in an economical manner. The District spends approximately $15,000 per year to send its GIS staff to GIS vendor training for core training or for training updates as the vendor’s software evolves. The GIS “Guru” also attends numerous sessions in advanced training with the vendor and assumes responsibility for the training and daily assistance to others in the effective utilization of the GIS. The District has also opened use of its GIS to other agencies in the area to perform training and prepare land-base related studies and project work facilitated by the GIS format.
Conclusions
LVMWD’s experience with getting approval to implement GIS was an exercise in constant and determined effort that eventually paid of – both in terms of finally realizing our GIS vision and in terms of implementing a system that is now recognized as making an important contribution to the District’s operations. Our experience may provide other organizations who find themselves in situations of “luke-warm” support for GIS some encouragement and ideas. Looking back, our current success seems to be attributable to several factors:

Constantly keeping the message alive
Working diligently and creatively to educate all levels of the organization
Including the Board and top management in routine briefings on GIS
Focusing on building understanding on how GIS would benefit the organization and developing a consensus to move forward
Using a consultant at key junctures of the program (developing the plan, assisting with winning approval, preparing a database design, developing custom applications)
Generating early results that are meaningful and visible to the organization and your management