SPLASH: San Diego’s Successful GIS

I’d like to say that the way we proceeded from that point on was planned, but the reality is that things just began to happen. First, even though the new technology seemed promising, the SPLASH team was skeptical. Could it be accomplished in less than six months? The vendor said it could be done in 60 days, but we wanted proof. We had an exceptional group of technical people working on SPLASH who had many years of background in GIS and had performed implementations on different GIS platforms. We had seasoned City personnel who had implemented the original SPLASH program and clearly understood the business requirements for a water and wastewater facility enterprise GIS program. The SPLASH team had documented both the business and technical deficiencies of the existing SPLASH application and knew what the requirements were for the integration with the enterprise database, called TIDES. We had a solid starting point but there were other roadblocks to come.

It was the second quarter of 1996, the EPA wanted implementation of the work order application, SWIM, to begin by September of that year. Following that mandate, a two-week pilot program was initiated to prove that the vendor could provide the required critical functionality for SPLASH. A pilot was developed on-site using the water/wastewater spatial data. Examples of required critical functionality included:

two-way attribute data replication with Oracle
meeting established performance measures
roviding user-friendly, high-performing standard and ad hoc mapping tools
supporting long and short transactions without locking out any users
functionality that would notify SPLASH of changes made from the work order application
automatic placement of featured-linked annotation
symbology
user-friendly query and reporting tools
the ability to provide spatial data to our City/County GIS program
a seamless spatial database that supports data integrity
solid, reliable network connectivity

A clearly documented technical review that included our GIS IT provider and City SPLASH team members was completed by the two-week deadline. Rating criteria were established that clearly evaluated the vendor’s ability to deliver all critical requirements.