GIS Maintenance Process Improvement Saves Millions of Dollars

About the Program

Category: Information Technology (Best in Category)

Year: 2017

The Miami-Dade Water and Sewer Department serves the needs of nearly 2.3 million Miami-Dade County residents, businesses, and visitors by providing high-quality drinking water and wastewater disposal services. It manages thousands of miles of water and wastewater pipes, distributing and collecting hundreds of millions of gallons of water and wastewater per day. Over the years, due to lack of funding, resources, and management of the GIS data maintenance process, the department’s GIS utility layers were not being accurately updated creating a very large backlog. However, with the recently mandated Federal Consent Decree, the department was charged with bringing all GIS utility layers up to date, including reported discrepancies, by June 6, 2017. This included more than 1,800 construction projects and 2,000 reported GIS data discrepancies. To add to this, all new projects must be completed within 90 days of asset activation in the field. To do this, their IT GIS team needed to revisit all departmental GIS needs, processes and implement improvements that would allow meeting the very aggressive consent decree deadlines.