SPLASH: San Diego’s Successful GIS

The City of San Diego Water Department began the conversion for its water and wastewater GIS program, SPLASH, in 1990. The program is now successful beyond our highest expectations, but the path to that success was not an easy one.

During the first four years, the program hit numerous roadblocks, starting with spatially inaccurate data from the wastewater conversion vendor. From there we struggled with the development of the original SPLASH GIS maintenance application. The SPLASH application was plagued with fatal errors, data integrity issues, and performance and reliability problems. We added staff to improve productivity, but the maintenance of data was fast falling behind. Within a matter of a few years we had accumulated a growing backlog of work: approximately 900 water and wastewater improvement and replacement drawings. The SPLASH program found itself in a position where management was considering going back to pen-and-ink mapping because the data entry process was slow and unreliable. Some GIS queries had to be done by hand, looking through old 400'-scale field crew maps because the data was not trusted. With continued budget overruns and a growing backlog of work, we had to find another solution for mapping.

In addition to trying to turn around an unsuccessful GIS program, the MIS section decided to embark upon the development of an enterprise database that would use the SPLASH facility data as the foundation of the enterprise. The first application that would be integrating with our then stand-alone GIS program was a work order application for water and wastewater operations and maintenance staff. Oracle (Redwood Shores, Calif.) was to be the enterprise database platform and SPLASH had to update and manage the water and wastewater facility data through Oracle. The orders from management were clear: SPLASH could no longer be unreliable, counterproductive, or proprietary. During the next two years SPLASH struggled with its GIS software, calling in experts and making little progress toward integration, reliability, or productivity. In the meantime, the enterprise database and work order application were being developed and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was demanding that the work order application be implemented for the wastewater operations and maintenance staff. SPLASH had less than six months to resolve the growing design issues, develop a new SPLASH application, clean up the data, train the staff, and implement the application. It seemed impossible. Then we were introduced to the new object technology and our journey to success began.