When San Diego underwent restructuring several years ago, the city's Department of Transportation's Street Services Division -- which already maintained 3,000 miles of street with more than 3,700 miles of sidewalk -- found itself with expanded responsibilities, which included street trees, storm drain pipes and channels, storm drain pump stations, storm-water pollution control, traffic and street name signs, streetlights, traffic signals, street sweeping, bridges and guardrails.

Each new section that was moved into the street division brought its own work management or tracking system.

"We ended up with about four different work management tools, some were homegrown, some mainframe," said Elizabeth Mueller, information systems manager for the division. "So a little over four years ago, we took the opportunity to reengineer the way we did business. We needed a better way to track our work resources, our assets, the requests from the citizens, and to ensure that all parts of the division -- with its 370 employees -- could function together."

Mueller and Jonathan Levy, the deputy director who ran operations, looked for a solution to help manage the division's varied responsibilities better. This is when the idea of synergy came to the fore.

"It started more as a philosophy or a methodology than a project name," Mueller said. "We wanted to become exactly that -- more synergistic. We found a lot of software that specialized in street infrastructure or road signs, but we wanted something that could track everything. We needed a way to integrate all the information with our crews so they are not out paving a street one week, and the following week another crew was going out to dig up that very street. We had to find a solution that allowed everybody in the division to know what everyone else was doing. That was the genesis of the whole project we ended up calling Project Synergy."

They considered either customizing an existing specialized package or using an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution. One problem, Mueller said, is that because technology moves so fast, an agency often must replace the solution before the expected five years is up, because the solution no longer meets agency need.

"That can get very costly," she said. "We were trying to find a solution that could evolve and expand, and that we wouldn't have to replace. For that reason, when we looked out at different management systems, we were leaning toward a true ERP system that encompassed a lot more than one specific area."

One ERP application sold by SAP caught their eye because it could interface with other software packages. Their timing couldn't have been better. SAP had just announced a partnership with ESRI, which supplied the GIS software the city was already using for spatial applications.

"We thought, 'Why don't we try integrating these together?'" said Mueller. "No one had done that yet, but we forged a three-way partnership to accomplish it -- SAP, ESRI and the city. That is one thing that made this project so unique from a technical standpoint.

"In about a year, working in partnership, San Diego, SAP and ESRI took these two huge software packages and brought them together so they could talk together in real time through a very thin client, which made it very fast," she said.

Linking the two software applications gave the department a spatial reference to all work planned and done. Staff could simply go to a map, click on any one of their assets at a particular location -- a streetlight, road, tree -- and get immediate access to SAP data showing all work completed at that location, any outstanding requests and work orders, and any other relevant information.

Realization of the project's goal was beginning -- true synergy, the ability for everybody in the division to know