Agenda Index City of Vancouver

ADMINISTRATIVE REPORT

TO:

Standing Committee on City Services and Budgets

FROM:

Chief Information Officer and the General Managers of Community Services and Engineering Services

SUBJECT:

Information Technology for Development and Building Review, Engineering, and Related Areas

RECOMMENDATIONS

GENERAL MANAGERS' AND CIO'S COMMENTS

COUNCIL POLICY

On June 19, 1990, Council established `information' as one of the City's corporate priorities.

On December 8, 1994, Council approved an Information Systems Plan for the City that recognized the importance of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) to the City.

On July 23, 1996, Council approved a Long Term Financing Strategy--Information Technology Replacement Program that identified funds for a number of information technology projects, including GIS municipal applications. Staff were directed to report back to Council for approval to spend funds identified in this Program.

On April 10, 1997, Council approved development and implementation of a prototype in support of the Development and Building Review (DBR) process and development of systems requirements.

On July 31, 1997, Council approved funding for GIS infrastructure.

On several dates, Council has approved resolutions supporting the Better City government Program.

SUMMARY

The City has invested in a corporate Geographic Information System (GIS is a computer system specifically designed to create, maintain, analyze, and report on geographical data) and staff are developing applications to move forward with deployment of this technology. A number of applications are currently in production including a link between the GIS and the City's new licensing system, a soils application used to track and maintain soil sample information, and a viewing application is available on the City's intranet; a list of applications is included in Appendix 1. These applications are used in Engineering Services, Community Services, and other departments. Other GIS-based applications continue to be developed.

The Development and Building Review (DBR) pilot project is well underway; it requires supporting information technology to grow to the point where it is processing all development and related activities and achieving the efficiencies previously identified to Council. Staff have worked for a year to identify and document the requirements for this technology.

Engineering Services has a need to substantially expand the use of GIS to tie geographically-based data together. This need arises in part because of its important role in the permitting and development activities in the City and the need to improve the technology that supports these processes. The development process ties directly to the City's underground infrastructure (water and sewer) which can be better managed by integrating the locations of the infrastructure with development and street activity information.

To provide supporting technology for DBR and Engineering, and to further the deployment of GIS throughout the City and leverage off of past investments, staff are recommending that the City enter into a contract with SHL Systemhouse to gain access to the applications available in the Municipal Applications Partnership (MAP, or the Partnership) and other third party related products and to enhance them for use in the City. MAP is a cooperative application development partnership between several municipal governments in Canada and the United States and SHL Systemhouse (the current provider of GIS to the City). The primary objective of the Partnership is to identify and deliver business applications which are fully integrated with each other and with the City's GIS; this is achievable in a more cost-effective method for the partners than doing it outside of the Partnership because application development resources and expertise is pooled. The applications scheduled to be provided by the Partnership align with applications already identified as important for the City to develop and provide in one manner or another. There are many other benefits of MAP; the most significant is a site license for the GIS software.

This technology will help DBR achieve its anticipated reductions in processing time for complex projects (25%) and for simpler projects (10%). It will provide better information for the replacement, maintenance, and operation of Engineering infrastructure. The Partnership applications also provide a technology base to integrate multi-departmental processes relating to the development process, thereby identifying and eliminating bottlenecks. However, the corporate benefits of the applications are significant and go well beyond Community Services and Engineering Services-virtually all staff in the City who utilize maps and geographical information will see improvements that result from making current information much easier to access. This includes staff who provide front-line customer support as well as staff who are involved the day-to-day decision-making activities.

This initiative supports many previously-identified Better City Government initiatives in the following areas: DBR, licensing, facility maintenance, solid waste management, Revenue Services, Engineering street survey and design, and telecommunications broadband infrastructure projects.

PURPOSE

This Report is seeking Council's approval to allocate funds and to enter into a contract with SHL Systemhouse for delivery and enhancement of business applications to support the Development and Building Review process, Engineering infrastructure management, and to provide an increased ability for staff to access geographic information throughout the City.

BACKGROUND

In July, 1997, Council approved moving forward with Phase 2 of the City's GIS project, the objective of which is to make additional GIS applications available to staff who would benefit from their use. As a result of that approval, several GIS applications are being developed, and others planned (see Appendix 1).

The July, 1997 Report indicated that GIS would be required to support the DBR project, which is the subject of an accompanying report to Council. The GIS report also indicated that staff were considering the merits of participation in the Municipal Applications Partnership (MAP) which is a cooperative application development partnership between a number of regional and municipal governments and the City's GIS vendor. MAP provides a suite of applications that are fully integrated with each other and fully integrated with the City's GIS. The initial application areas include development tracking, property information management, sewer and water infrastructure, and roads and traffic infrastructure. The Partnership also provides a data browser with a variety of capabilities that will help hundreds of City staff better perform their jobs by giving them easy access to current maps and extensive descriptive data (such as ownership, assessments, zoning, development activity, etc.). This will provide substantial benefits to the public in terms of better service, and ultimately direct access to certain data. This initiative will also provide support for several Better City Government projects.

As a result of discussions with staff and the benefits offered, the General Managers of Community Services and Engineering Services, together with the Chief Information Officer recommend that the City move forward with participation in the Partnership to meet the information technology needs of Community Services, Engineering Services, and other business units which participate in the development process and which make use of addresses and geographical data.

DISCUSSION

Council recognized the importance of information generally to the operations of the City in 1990 with a statement that the City's information systems needed to be improved. More specifically, the role of geographic information was affirmed in 1994 when the Information Systems Plan was approved. Subsequent reports have provided direct funding for the establishment and maintenance of a corporate GIS. City staff are increasingly accessing this information, or expressing interest in accessing this information. While the bulk of the interest is from Engineering Services and Community Services, it comes from other departments as well. With the recent introduction of a web-based viewing application on the City's intranet, every staff member in the City with a web browser is able to view basic GIS data, such as parcels and addresses.

GIS has a significant requirement for data. Engineering Services has created most of the data that is resident in the GIS (for example, land, water, sewer, and some outside utilities including gas, electric, and telephone), Community Services has added zoning data, and voting division information exists from the 1996 election. More importantly, staff and management are interested in moving to an environment where much more geographic data is integrated together in the GIS database and is easily accessible. Additional data of interest includes socio-economic characteristics, development activity, ownership and assessed values, trees, infrastructure, soil conditions, among many others. This data has significant value and the City is constantly receiving requests from the public to purchase all or portions of the database, however there are not sufficient staff resources to be responsive to these requests.

However, the data in the GIS can only be created, maintained, reported on, and analyzed through the use of applications. To date, the City has not allocated sufficient staff resources to keep up with the demand for applications and to make full use of this data. As a result, there are many applications that staff believe would increase their productivity that have yet to be created. Furthermore, there are benefits to be obtained if these applications are integrated so that they have a similar look and feel and allow users to access data of different types and avoid duplication of effort.

SHL Systemhouse, through the Municipal Applications Partnership, provides a method for addressing the problem facing municipal governments which are "data rich and application poor". The members of the Partnership work cooperatively to jointly determine a priority for applications of common interest, and determine the detailed requirements for each. The applications available through the Partnership are municipal business applications which are fully integrated with each other and which have a fully integrated spatial component (that is, the applications have GIS capabilities integrated into them). Following the initial development of the applications, SHL owns, markets, maintains, and enhances the application suite to ensure that they continue to be fully integrated and that they meet the needs of existing and new members. This allows participants to receive more developed applications faster than they could otherwise produce on their own and represents the best combination of the build and buy strategies for application development. Participation also brings MAP users together to share knowledge and experience with these and other applications. Financially, the City will benefit by the pooling of partners' application development resources (existing partners have already contributed in excess of $6,000,000 specifically towards application development), as well as receiving a reduced rate for maintenance of these applications for several years.

By joining MAP, the City will receive an unlimited use, perpetual site license for the core VISION* software (this is the City's corporate GIS product) and all applications developed by the Partnership thus far and in the future and the right to have input to what thoseapplications do. The site license significantly reduces the cost of deploying GIS-enabled applications as there is little if any GIS licensing cost to factor in; this will make it much easier to make these applications broadly available on the desktop.

The Partnership is currently in place in the Ottawa region where the participants include the Regional Municipality of Ottawa-Carleton (RMOC), the City of Ottawa, ten other Ottawa suburbs, and SHL Systemhouse (the partners include 98% of the population in the region). The Ontario government supported the Partnership by making a one-time substantial contribution for research and development. Pinellas County, Florida (population 900,000) and Clarington, Ontario (population 65,000) have joined, while Windsor, Ontario (population 200,000) and La Plata, Argentina (population 600,000) are in the final approval stages. Other cities have expressed interest and the benefits that will flow to the City will increase as the number of partners increases. The first group of applications includes Development Tracking, Property Information System, Water and Sewer Infrastructure Management, Roads and Traffic Infrastructure Management, and common modules which include a Browser (an easy-to-use application for viewing geographic data and its characteristics such as zoning and assessed value) and an application for notifying addresses within a geographic area (this will be used frequently by City Clerk's, Community Services, Corporate Services, and Engineering Services). Appendix 2 contains brief descriptions of the MAP applications developed thus far and others that are under consideration by the partners.

Staff have identified a need for the MAP applications need to integrate with the financial and human resources components of SAP currently being implemented. Points of communication between the two environments include access to and sharing of financial and human resources information, as well as infrastructure and maintenance information. SHL Systemhouse has previously identified and researched how these two environments can be integrated.

Benefits of Membership
The benefits associated with membership fall into several categories. The first category includes the value of contributions by existing members including SHL's VISION* site license, as well as some direct cost savings; the City receives these with the Partnership. These can be summarized as follows:

This amount will increase as membership increase because contributions will continue to provide new and enhanced applications that will be available to the City without additional acquisition costs being incurred.

The second set of benefits flow directly from the use of the applications and licenses that will be delivered. These are ongoing, annual benefits which result from:

These benefits are based on the assumption that the applications are fully implemented and that all staff who need access in fact have access to them. However, as many of these benefits derive from improved effectiveness of business processes, a further study will need to be carried out when this system is fully operational to determine the extent of any savings.

These benefits derive from improving staff's ability to utilize geographic data; the potential of these benefits becomes more obvious when the number of staff who use paper maps in their day-to-day work as a means of recording, viewing, and integrating geographic data is recognized. This is seen by the variety of data that is recorded on maps--examples include utility locations, zoning and subdivision information, development permit information, bike routes, parks, greenways, traffic volumes, inspection areas, locations of various facilities, and a substantial amount of policy and planning data (including data from BCAA, Statistics Canada, etc.). However, using paper maps can be a time consuming process, there are limits to the amount of data that can be manually recorded on one map, and the paper maps are often out of date shortly after they are printed. In order to keep printed maps current, some staff have been manually updating their own maps; this often represents a duplication of effort by other staff.

Specific benefits resulting from utilizing GIS-enabled business applications in the City, particularly when they employ a common database, can be categorized as follows:

These benefits are ongoing and corporate in nature. They enable staff to be more efficient and serve the public and each other better.

STAFFING IMPLICATIONS

Staff are required for this implementation in several areas. Subject to evaluation by the Director of Human Resources, it is recommended that the following staff be hired on a temporary basis for the implementation for up to eighteen months:

On an ongoing basis, the following staffing requirements have been identified:

A copy of this report has been provided to CUPE Local 15.

FINANCIAL IMPLICATIONS

The cost of participating in MAP and implementing the application suite is substantial; details are provided in Table 1. The costs associated with implementing this technology include acquisition costs, implementation costs, and ongoing maintenance and support costs.

There are several funding sources which reflects the fact that some benefits are corporate in nature, while others are more targeted. The funding sources are:

As part of the financial analysis, staff examined whether the MAP approach is more or less efficient in comparison to purchasing a series of separate applications which would then be integrated with each other and with the GIS. The conclusion of that analysis is that the MAP approach would be less expensive on both an acquisition and an annual maintenance basis.

PURCHASING IMPLICATIONS

In January, 1997, the City issued a Request For Information stating very high level requirements for technology to support the new DBR processes. Approximately 50 vendors and systems integrators received the document; six responded, including SHL Systemhouse. During 1997, staff from DBR, Information Technology, and Engineering, with input from Purchasing and Law, created a draft Request for Proposal containing a more detailed statement of requirements for the DBR area.

The draft RFP contained a requirement to have integration between the applications that would meet DBR's needs and the related needs of other business units. The desire to purchase an integrated suite of applications in this area is similar to the City's desire to purchase integrated core financial, human resource, and payroll systems for the City in 1997. This form of integration reduces the maintenance workload for City staff in addition to reducing implementation and training costs.

It became apparent during the latter stages of the drafting process, in part through site visits, that only SHL Systemhouse, the City's current GIS vendor, could meet the requirements of DBR, Engineering Services, offer an integrated suite of relevant applications, and fully integrate with the City's GIS. As well, the acquisition price for the applications had been known for over two years.
Purchasing advised that given that the Partnership was the sole qualified integrated software package, it was preferable to move directly to negotiations with SHL Systemhouse rather than issuing an RFP. Consequently, this Council Report seeks approval to negotiate a contract with SHL Systemhouse subject to the approval of the Director of Legal Services in consultation with the General Managers of Community Services and Engineering Services, and the Chief Information Officer.

The purchase price of the MAP suite includes all future applications developed by the Partnership. Should the City wish to implement any new MAP applications, the City will incur some costs to determine the City's precise requirements for the applications, as well as to implement the applications.

CONCLUSIONS

The City has invested heavily in the creation of a valuable geographic database, and is ready to acquire applications to allow staff to make full use of it, and by doing so, to provide better service to the public and to other staff. New information technology is required to support the DBR process, Engineering infrastructure, as well as related areas in Engineering and other departments.

The Municipal Applications Partnership provides a unique opportunity to address these requirements. The Partnership is a cooperative arrangement with other municipal and regional governments with the primary objective of providing business applications with a GIS component. Their implementation will provide several opportunities for improved service to the public, and will increase staff efficiency.

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Appendix 1: City GIS Applications

The following applications were developed during Phase 1 of the City's GIS project and are currently used by staff to:

Appendix 2: List of MAP Applications

Building Blocks

Foundation Applications

Additional Applications

ATTACHMENTS TO THIS DOCUMENT THAT DO NOT HAVE ELECTRONIC COPY ARE AVAILABLE ON FILE IN THE CITY CLERK'S OFFICE

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