City of Cleveland

View Photo(s) of Award Presentation

Project Goal

Our goal is the development of an Enterprise GIS to support existing citywide business processes and initiatives, including: utilities; planning; safety;capital projects;and permits.

To realize this goal Cleveland first had to develop:

1) GIS datasets
2) Applications
3) A GIS team

A unique goal of the project was the inception of the Cleveland Resident Workforce (CRW). Under this program 35+ city residents were hired & trained to perform GIS conversion work. The program offered GIS training, salary, benefits, and bonuses. As a result, residents left with marketable skills.

Core applications were developed to support data maintenance, interoperability, and program management. A web application was developed to satisfy GIS functionality needs.

As an ongoing effort to meet our goals the Cleveland Enterprise GIS (CEGIS) team was established to support the components that define an Enterprise GIS. CEGIS now has 13 full-time GIS/Permit professionals, including 3 grads from the CRW.

Business Problem Solved

As a municipal enterprise system our business of public service and a public utility is multi-faceted. From a utility standpoint, the GIS provides a very detailed, as-built view of our distribution and collection systems. The result is a foundation for hydraulic modeling and engineering work. The level of detail we have elevates us toward infrastructure asset management in terms of work management, inventory, finance, and asset criticality. From a public service perspective, GIS provides inherent efficiencies in our day-today business. But it’s really the growing recognition of GIS as a key point of integration with other information systems. City departments can visualize and analyze data in a way never imagined…spatially.

Technology Implemented

We implemented Orion’s OnPoint software utilizing ArcIMS services as our enterprise GIS web application. Data editing and maintenance applications utilize a combination of ArcGIS 9.2 tools and Miner & Miner ArcFM tools. Editing workflows are managed by ESRI’s Job Tracking (JTX). High end GIS analysis and mapping functions are performed in ArcGIS 9.2 with a multitude of ESRI and 3rd party vendor extensions (e.g. Spatial Analyst, RouteSmart and CrimeView). Vector data is stored in ArcSDE 9.2 utilizing Oracle 10g as the RDBMS. We implemented a 3 tiered replicated SDE environment consisting of multiple local edit environments that are pushed to a staging database and then replicated to the enterprise SDE database that populates all system applications. Raster data is pushed to all applications via ESRI’s ImageServer. We virtualized the majority of our environment utilizing VMware. We virtualized to take advantage of our existing HW and create a scalable and highly available system.

Development Team Biography

Xander Mavrides, PhD – GIS Manager
Lucretia Hughes – Permit System Manager
Chris Davis, GISP – GIS Systems Manager
Brian Wopershall, PE – GIS Applications Manager
Angela Gotch – GIS Specialist
Chris Sadowski – GIS Specialist
Anthony Atkins – GIS Technician
Rocco Cuffari – GIS Systems Administrator
Frank Scelina – GIS Database Administrator
Jennifer Gedeon – Permit System Analyst
David Dennis – GIS Staff/Grants
Alex Margevicius, PE – Water Engineering
Guy Singer, PE – Water Engineering

MWH Americas, Inc.