Challenge

The City of Fairfield, California faced several challenges in building a functional enterprise GIS. Fairfield had fragmented, disparate GIS technologies and limited communication with other city business units and external partners. Fairfield needed an enterprise-wide strategic GIS to support the business objectives of its internal departments and the ability to communicate efficiently with external partners.

Solution

Fairfield requested Farallon to review data and processes, speak with selected staff members, and to make GIS technology recommendations. Fairfield possessed software from Intergraph, Bentley, Oracle, and ESRI. Farallon reviewed and evaluated the city’s diverse GIS applications, information and workflows, in-house staff expertise, and departmental business objectives. The project team built a business case for enterprise GIS that optimally met technical, administrative, budgetary, and stakeholder requirements.

Farallon considered several key factors in making their recommendations:

• Fairfield’s diverse in-house GIS expertise and capabilities
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• Existing geospatial and attribute information flows and procedures
• Fairfield IT staff competencies and expertise
• The GIS needs and collaboration drivers for Fairfield’s primary external partners (eg, Solano County and the Fairfield Suisun Sewer District)
• The need for early GIS results that would demonstrate the ability of the enterprise GIS to better achieve the business goals of city executives, managers, and technical staff

Farallon recommended that Fairfield develop an enterprise geodatabase using ESRI’s ArcSDE and Microsoft’s SQL Server software.  This design supported traditional GIS users within the public works and police departments, as well as new business users in other departments. After presenting the enterprise GIS design, Farallon implemented a geospatial portal that allows all city staff to quickly create notification lists and summary reports for any property within the city.

Before the geospatial portal, doing property queries or making address labels and mailings for property-related notification tasks was a tedious and time-consuming task, averaging a minimum of several hours per request. Using a property review and notification GIS web portal, city employees can click on a property, get instant property assessment information and, for notification, automatically generate a buffer zone around that property to generate mailing labels in less than 20 minutes.

Categories: Web Applications, Notification, Property Review, GIS/IT Integration, Master Address Database, Geodatabase Design, Planning & Training, GIS Needs Asssessment

Selected screenshots from the project

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Create Property Notification Mailing List for Nearby Properties	Property Notification Radius
Property Notification Property Details	Property Notification Map View
Property Notification Property Selection Screen