Canvassing App

About the Program

Category: Information Technology (Best in Category)

Year: 2014

Alameda County is home to 1.5 million residents, over 440,000 real properties and 50,000 business properties. The Alameda County Assessor’s Office has 40 appraisers on staff who routinely visit properties in order to determine assessed property values. The Assessor’s Office, in cooperation with the IT Department, developed and implemented a new mobile tool for the staff, in order to increase their productivity and eliminate use of paper. The tool is a GIS mobile application, which provides the appraiser with real-time information about the visited property, allows the appraiser to update records during the visit. The application was deployed on iPads and was first used in the summer of 2013 to canvas business properties. The application reduced the total effort of annual business properties canvassing by 50% and eliminated the use of paper forms. It also served as a proof of concept and a model project for the further implementation of mobile technology for the field operations by the Alameda County Assessor’s and Tax Collector’s Offices. The application was built on the Enterprise ArcGIS ESRI platform currently used by Alameda County. Program implementation cycle - from conception to production rollout - was less than 5 months.