Case Study: Improving access to information and Service Through Web Mapping (ESRI)

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County of Essex Improving access to information and service delivery through web mapping Goals: Overview Problem: The County of Essex is located in southern Ontario and has a GIS Department that The county of Essex needed to reduce is responsible for coordinating various GIS activities for seven local municipalities. wait times for municipal staff in The Department helps determine GIS software and hardware needs, establishes logging citizens' service requests through Citrix to make more efficient spatial data and technology standards, and provides direction for the use of municipal employees time and management of regional spatial datasets. Their main goal is to reduce duplication g g p g p improve the quality of service to of effort and increase communication through shared technology and data constituents. standards. Goals: To better coordinate public works asset management, Essex implemented a • Reduce time consuming centralized work order management system (Cityworks) in 2004. Using Cityworks, procedures and processes followed each municipality connects to their own data and is able to control access and in the past (logging into Citrix, edit rights to their information which is located in a Geodatabase which resides on municipal employees receive and servers at the County of Essex. log citizen requests) • Create an easy to use, accurate, and efficient workflow to record and Cityworks quickly proved to be a valuable work order management system to track citizen service requests process municipal work orders. • Improve municipal governments response to their citizens The Challenge • Reduce costs associated with Since Cityworks ran off the County's server, it was accessed by Municipalities manually receiving calls from through an application (Citrix) that integrates Municipal networks with County constituents enterprise systems and software. Although the enterprise model is an efficient • Improve citizens perception of one, loading the integrating software, Citrix, could be time consuming. This meant municipal service delivery when Citizens' called a Municipality with a service request, they were required to Results: wait on the phone until the application had loaded to allow staff to enter the • Phase One, internal roll out information relating to the issue into the Cityworks software and generate a work extremely successful resulting in order. The time delay not only affected the quality of service constituents significant savings in time and received, but was also an inefficient use of employees'time. effort to log citizen service requests. The Solution • System integration between web mapping service request To reduce these procedural inefficiencies and improve citizen satisfaction, the application embedded in County of Essex developed a map based service request system using Latitude Geocortex and centralized GeoCortex Internet Mapping Framework (IMF) to receive citizen information and Cityworks work management directly send this information to Cityworks via the Internet. Web -based mapping application smooth and seamless was viewed as the common application pulling all County applications together. The benefits of online administration provide convenience, while providing the ESRl Software Used: capabilities to visualize assets on a map improves communication and workflow ArcGI cGIS ArcIMS efficiencies. "Not only was this a user friendly solution to implement and use, it seamlessly integrates with our work management software Cityworks that runs in Other Software Used: conjunction with ArcGIS, said Wendy St. Amour, Essex County, Manager of Geocortex (Latitude) Information Technology. Cityworks (Azteca) The County's plan is to roll out the web service request system in two phases.