GIS Integration

When a contractor in Marin County, Calif., is going to dig beneath the street, the local water district must go out and mark the location of the underground pipes. Before, utility employees spent hours pinpointing pipe location records and matching them to local maps; whereas today, those employees can view maps on their laptops specific to the area where they're working. Within 5 minutes, workers have pipe location and details, thanks to software that integrates GIS and enterprise resource planning data.

Like many public agencies that have developed strong enterprise GIS departments, the Marin Municipal Water District (MMWD) is taking the next step to get the most out of its mapping expertise by integrating its GIS software from ESRI and its enterprise financial software from SAP.

"The biggest improvement is that our workers can now update infrastructure through a map," said Gavin McGhie, GIS coordinator for the MMWD, which provides drinking water to approximately 190,000 Marin County residents. "To record where new pipes and valves have been added or other pieces of pipe abandoned, they can just click a button on the map, and that information is automatically added to the asset maintenance module of SAP."

This push toward greater integration resulted from CIOs moving beyond viewing GIS simply as a mapping tool, said Chris Thomas, state and local government manager for ESRI, a GIS vendor. "They started to realize they need a central repository so that the GIS data isn't sitting in silos, and so they don't have duplicative GIS efforts in different departments."

As more municipalities create enterprise GIS departments, Thomas said, the level of interest in combining GIS data with other systems is getting stronger. He gave the example of Philadelphia's creation of executive dashboards that combine GIS data and legacy financial systems. "It's exciting to see," he added. "The kinds of things we were expecting to see a few years ago are happening now."


Rocky Beginning
If the potential for efficiency gains is clear, the path to GIS integration with enterprise software is less so. It usually involves hiring consultants to write and maintain customized interfaces.

GIS integration can be the catalyst -- almost unintentionally -- for business process re-engineering that can be painful but helpful, said J. Wayne Moore, a software architect with Manatron Inc., a Portage, Mich., maker of property-management software for local governments. For instance, he said, assessment and tax record departments might have different ways to update constituents' addresses. "Every one of these departments is a silo, and you have to get them to agree on how to do something like record addresses. Without integration," Moore added, "it's almost impossible to keep it all synchronized."

Although McGhie is pleased with the results of the MMWD integration project and excited about its potential, he admits the journey was time-consuming and difficult, with a customized-software detour along the way.

The MMWD had previously custom-developed an interface between GIS and its legacy billing system, which was being retired in 2001. When its SAP implementation began, the agency worked with a consultant to build a custom GIS/SAP interface. "It took almost a year, and there were lots of fiascos," McGhie recalled. "We ended up with something that was about 80 percent of what we wanted." McGhie also was concerned that maintenance and changes to the interface would require additional consulting work.

At a 2003 ESRI user conference, McGhie met with Waltham, Mass.-based Impress Software, which had worked on other types of SAP integration projects. McGhie agreed to be a pilot customer in the development of a GIS/SAP interface. In 2004, using McGhie's wish list, Impress built an interface for Marin that it could sell to other utility districts. The design and development process took about a year, he said.