Designing a data utility

Designing a data utility

Bill Findlay
Manager Business Integration
City of Calgary – Engineering Services
PO Box 2100 Station M
Calgary, Alberta, Can.
T2P 2M5

Abstract
Enterprises attempting to deliver the benefits of GIS must deal with data from numerous sources; databases from asset management and document management systems, spatial data from landbase and utility maps, imaging data from aerial photographs and mechanical drawings, etc.

In addition, some significant questions about this data need to be asked; what is available, where is it located, how current is it, how accurate is it? Whatever the source or the quality, success of GIS depends on using as much relevant data you can get your hands on, it’s all about the data!

These data integration issues can be addressed in a number of ways each having associated costs and impacts to the enterprise. Some of the solutions are:

translation programs which regularly replicate data into new formats
Enterprise Application Integration initiatives which re-engineer processes
one-time conversion projects which enable new data maintenance environments

Data integration issues can also be mitigated by organizational changes. At the City of Calgary, the Engineering Services Department has recently been reorganized to improve the service we are providing to the Corporation. Our new Mission Statement is, “To manage the City of Calgary’s spatial data and infrastructure information, and to provide innovative and technical and professional services to our business partners”.

This paper will describe the changes implemented to provide the enterprise with a one-stop-shopping source for data. Our message to our utility customers is, “It’s your business to build and operate infrastructure and facilities, it’s our business to maintain data". We don’t try to build roads or pipelines, don’t you try to be spatial data experts. Think of us as the Corporation’s data utility”.

Introduction
At the City of Calgary, with twenty-five different Business Units all creating some sort of data, data integration has the potential of causing significant problems with associated significant costs.

Data integration issues do exist to a certain extent but have been mitigated by organizational methods. The Engineering Services Department has been designed with the vision of “being the partner of choice in spatial data and infrastructure information management”.

We’re designed to be the “one-stop-shopping” source for spatial data expertise. Our customers’ business is to build, operate and maintain utilities; roadways, pipelines and telecommunication networks. Our business is to build and maintain the spatial data they require to do their business.

Background
Engineering Services has been designed to provide the Corporation and over 700 external customers with geographic data and infrastructure information services such as:

Surveying
Drafting Mapping
Database management
Municipal-rights-of-way management
Licensing and marketing of Corporate data

We are responsible for creating and maintaining four key datasets; Legal Base, Property Base Road Network and Digital Aerial Survey. This information serves as foundation data for our internal and external customers who use maps and GIS.

For our internal customers we create and maintain datasets for; Waterworks, Wastewater & Drainage, Roads (Street Lighting, Traffic Signals, Curb & Gutter and Sidewalks) and Telecommunications.

For our external customers we create and maintain key information for construction, real estate and land development industries as well as provide web-based services such as City OnLine and Calgary eMaps.

Business Process Improvements
Beginning in 2000 the City of Calgary underwent a total reorganization, which enabled all Business Units to examine their existing cultures and environments. During this reorganization Engineering Services identified a number of business process improvement opportunities.

Implement better integration of goals and coordination of work among work units
Improve communications and relationships among work units
Develop a comprehensive marketing strategy to attract new internal and external customers
Evaluate services to ensure customer needs (accuracy, timeliness and quality) are met and prices are appropriate
Review opportunities to improve Corporate effectiveness and efficiency through leveraging the technology and skill within Engineering Services
Keep abreast of new procedures and innovations within our industry and our customer’s industries

During the last year Engineering Services has also devoted much effort to develop an understanding of service levels required from business units which we considered critical to our success.

Information Technology for support of system architecture and local area networks.
Human Resources for training requirements, compensation structure and performance management.
Finance for analysis to support implementation issues and cost of services.

Although we were put in a position of taking on new business opportunities and meeting demands from “new-look” customers, our new culture had to be representative of our existing values;

responsive customer service
strong customer relationships
quality services and products
innovation and continuous improvement
strategic use of technology

Combining our existing culture with new opportunities resulting from the Corporation’s total reorganization, we designed a new structure, which enabled us to strengthen our vision of being the partner of choice in spatial data and infrastructure information management

Organization
During the later part of 2000 we created the following organization consisting of a General Manager and 8 Divisions, approximately 140 staff. Each division has a manager who is responsible for the following activities.

Municipal Rights-of-Way
In March 1999 Engineering Services was directed to establish a Manager to manage the Municipal Rights-of-Way for the Corporation. During the last year new legal agreements have been established with power and telecommunications companies doing business with the City of Calgary. This formalized and consolidated existing processes related to approval and regulation of privately owned shallow utilities within City owned rights-of-ways This Division, 18 staff, includes work groups who have traditionally been involved with related activities.

Utility Records coordinate and give approval to consulting engineers who create utility mapping and data for new subdivisions, which are eventually incorporated into City owned infrastructure. Plans are in place to replace the current hard copy submission/approval processes with electronic submission in an Autocad-Microstation environment in 2002.

Utility Line Assignments assign alignment locations within City owned rights-of-ways for all City owned and private utilities. They also coordinate the submission of asbuilt information and maintain subsequent records. Work takes place in an environment consisting of File Maker Pro and Oracle databases with Microstation CAD.

Building Grades assign location and pertinent elevation data for service connections for private developments, which tie into City infrastructure. This group also uses oracle and Microstation. The Print Shop and Microfilm group deliver “front counter” services, mostly in hard copy format, to internal customers and the Public. During 2001 they migrated from a legacy mainframe database application to an oracle/PC based document management application. Currently, this area maintains over 200,000 microfilm and over 57,000 scanned images (tiff and jpg formats).

Geomatics
The City Land Surveyor who has the technical and professional responsibility for Corporate Legal Survey interests manages this Division consisting of 29 staff. The Cadastral Mapping work unit creates and maintains three “core” datasets which are the foundation for all mapping or GIS in the Corporation; Legal Base Mapping, Ownership Parcel Mapping and Road Network. The unit predominantly uses Microstation processes linked to Oracle.

Another core dataset, the Digital Aerial Survey is maintained by in the Microstation environment by Geomatics Resources who also conduct land title searches and produce specialty mapping products; Floodway/Flood Plain, City Limits, Alberta Township Sections, Downtown 3 D Model and Hazardous Slope Maps.

In November 2001 a new GIS work unit was formed in Geomatics to maintain data translation activities for many corporate datasets (Microstation/oracle to ESRI's SDE). This unit will also develop GIS applications for the Corporation and our customers.

Legal Survey establishes the survey control system, GPS control surveys and conducts legal surveys.

Waterworks, Wastewater & Drainage and Roads Drafting
These three Divisions, 49 staff, provide specific Microstation CAD services for capital works projects, mechanical drawings and standard specification drawings for their respective customers. These Divisions also maintain three extensive oracle databases for various asset management applications; Hansen, Cassworks and AM/FM, and many other planning and infrastructure mapping products.

Engineering Survey
This Division of 31 permanent staff and approximately 10 seasonal staff provide field survey services for other business units throughout the Corporation. This includes location surveys for day-to-day utility operations and survey for new land development. By far, the major survey activities are capital works construction projects primarily for Roads. This group currently processes geodometer notes into Terramodel and Surplot mapping for detailed design, digital terrain modeling and calculating volumes.

Corporate Data Marketing
In 2000 Engineering Services was directed to take on the responsibility for licensing and marketing Corporate electronic data and provide distribution to commercial customers and the Public. Primary customers are legal firms and real estate companies. This Division, presently 6 staff, includes City Online. City Online was an existing electronic data distribution business which has migrated completely to being web based and currently has over 700 external customers.

Business Integration
This Division, the smallest by far with only 2 staff, was created during the corporate reorganization to better capitalize on emerging technologies and new opportunities for business as a result of the reorganization.

The Manager is responsible for performing business analysis required to integrate work processes and technology throughout the Department and analyze the integration of customer’s business and technologies into Engineering Services. This is especially true when it comes to implementing GIS technology throughout the Department.

In order to maintain our recognition for providing quality products and services in a growing business environment this Division is also responsible for initiating and maintaining contact with new and established customers to ensure customers needs and expectations are understood and meet.

Growth
2001 was a year of strong growth in Engineering Services. Our yearly budget grew 18% from $9.3 million in 2000 to $11 million. Projected budget numbers in 2001 indicate the following:

Revenues (14% of the budget) grew by $130,000.
Recoveries (61% of the budget) increased by $1 million
Mill Rate (25% of the budget) grew by $600,000

Since our reorganization we are providing data maintenance services for new customers such as Traffic Signs, Street Lighting and Telecommunications. We have taken on Corporate GIS initiatives such as data translation activities (Oracle/Microstation to SDE), development of GIS applications (Hazardous Slope Mapping) and data maintenance of the Telecommunications Network in the new Arc GIS environment. In addition, we have taken a leadership role for a number of large corporate funded projects.

Corporate Addressing and Mapping (CAM) Project
This $2.5 million project will redesign workflow processes and use of technology in Development & Building Approvals and Engineering Services, to ensure efficient and accurate updates occur to spatial data and POSSE addressing for the corporation. Leveraging existing mapping processes will ensure corporate-wide business needs can be met through the GIS environment.

The ultimate goal will be to develop a corporate addressing strategy to determine all addresses currently in use by the Corporation, link them to a geographic location and a single corporate database.

Block Profile Conversion Project
This $1.2 million project will convert one of the major products used by the Corporation, 34,000 manually drafted Block Profile Drawings, into an electronic format linking existing Microstation mapping to a newly created oracle database of utility elevations and road grade information.

Profile Calgary Project
Beginning in November 2001 Engineering Services will take over the leadership of this project to pull together technical and analytical staff from various business units to develop a comprehensive approach to “Profiling Calgary”.

Throughout the Corporation business units produce statistics on services, customers, demographics, socio-economic information, local improvements, etc. This data, when combined under a Ward or Community profile, would produce a valuable resource for the Corporation and more importantly the Public.

This is an opportunity to combine our Calgary Census, business unit survey(s) work, socio-economic and demographic data, service delivery statistics (transit users, parks visitors, etc), civic locations (fire halls, community centres, etc.) and service delivery improvements (road paving, sewer upgrades, etc.) into a meaningful summary.

Conclusion
Besides the tremendous growth and Corporate recognition we have experienced, this Data Utility concept has resulted in a number of benefits.

By centralizing/sharing experience and knowledge we can reduce duplication of effort. Having previous data conversion experience enables us to leverage and share existing processes or applications, which other less experienced data maintainers might not be aware of and could possibly duplicate.

Although we have increased our workload we have also increased work efficiencies. This has provided better service to existing customers (reflected in results from our last Customer Focus Session) and faster delivery of new service to new customers (we don’t reinvent any wheels).

By having a higher profile within the Corporation we have communicated significant data integration issues across the enterprise. Working with other business units, some who have their own data maintainers, such as GIS Centre of Excellence, Parks and Planning, we are working towards resolving stewardship problems.

During 2001 we funded Arc View or Arc GIS training for 46 staff at a cost of over $50,000. All these people were experienced surveyors, computer draftspersons and cartographers. Having experienced well-trained spatial data maintainers puts Engineering Services in the position of “being the partner of choice in spatial data and infrastructure information management”.

Data integration issues have been mitigated by organizational change. At the City of Calgary, the Engineering Services Department has shown success at becoming the enterprise’s Data Utility.