By Brian Haslam, Cityworks president and CEO
It is often said that a smart community is a connected community. Increasingly, a smart community puts GIS at the heart of its technology—a GIS-centric connected community.
In February, Esri published a white paper outlining ArcGIS Common Patterns of Use. These nine essential usage patterns appear across all GIS organizations regardless of industry or business model, and they lay the groundwork for long-term success. As Esri points out, the organizations that incorporate all of these patterns into their strategy experience the greatest return on investment (1).
Cityworks users have always looked to ArcGIS as the authoritative asset data repository. Local government and public organizations are accustomed to using ArcGIS for data management, field mobility, mapping and visualization, monitoring, and analytics—the first five ArcGIS common patterns of use. Once organizations adopt these patterns of use, they can implement the next four: design and planning, decision support, constituent engagement, and sharing and collaboration.
Conceptualizing the four patterns further, we can see how public asset management organizations can use Cityworks and ArcGIS to become a GIS-centric connected community. Uses include:
- Constituent Engagement: Local government and public service organizations embrace citizen and customer communication and collaboration, empowering residents to provide input, remain informed, and monitor progress.
- Organization Empowerment: Organizations empower management and staff to collaborate and easily discover, use, make, and share public asset data to better support maintenance services, inspections, permitting, public safety, and emergency response.
- Organization Decision Support: Easy-to-use tools help management and staff make real-time, data-driven decisions—supported by historical asset and location data.
- Organization Design and Planning: Public asset data analytics allow organizations to evaluate alternatives and develop initiatives that improve management, budgeting, planning, and design decisions.
These patterns of use have a common theme: information and communication. More than ever, residents want to help improve their community. And, more than ever, local leaders and public service providers want to ensure resources are effectively used to improve the experience of residents and businesses in their community.
Cityworks and ArcGIS, as well as third-party integrations, make it easy to collect, visualize, and share information. The GIS-centric framework also provides powerful tools for communicating with diverse stakeholders at all levels of an organization. These patterns of use are valuable in day-to-day operations, and they become especially critical during an emergency or public safety crisis. Examples are abundant: Zika virus mitigation and elimination at Miami Beach (2). Hurricane response and recovery in Texas, Florida, and many other locations (3).
The Cityworks platform is a time-tested, emergency-tested, superior platform for public asset management. Cityworks, with ArcGIS, supports the entire community by connecting public employees, policy leaders, residents, and business owners. Together, these individuals can work together to create a sustainable, resilient, and safe community—a GIS-centric connected community.
1 “Architecting the ArcGIS Platform: Best Practices.” Esri. February 2018.2 Monserrat, Marcia, 2 Adriana Castro, and Stanley Payne. “Fight the Bite.” Cityworks InPrint, Spring 2017: 24–27.3 3 “Hurricanes Harvey and Irma Emergency Management.” Cityworks InPrint, Fall 2017: 6–8.