The challenge has been to formalize that process instead of doing it ad hoc. We’ve been super successful. And we’ve been slowly expanding the process to more nonspatial work, and that’s proving to be a little bit more challenging than I thought. We don’t always have the same model available, where there is a small analytical team that has been using GIS for a long time. Whether they prepare maps or not, they recognize that 90 percent or more of the data they have to work with has a location component. For municipal departments that use client-centered data, they might have more control over privacy and sharing information because of privacy laws.
Essentially, we say that your source of record is your source of record. Manage it however you want to. Upgrade it whenever you want to. Add tables, delete tables. But when you commit to sharing with our central data warehouse, that becomes the enterprise authoritative version. And if you’re going to change within the enterprise authoritative version, you have to initiate a change in control. We have to know what the change is going to be and why it needs to happen. Then we have a small team of people investigate all of the dependencies that change may trigger — dependencies on that data for which that change could have a negative effect.
If we don’t see any negative effects, you get a green light. Refresh your data into the warehouse. If there is a problem, we negotiate it.
MORE FROM STATETECH: Find out how smart cities are deploying edge computing.
STATETECH: Philadelphia has some smart city projects coming up, and it’s an exciting time for the city to enter this space. What have you planned for the next year or two?
WHEELER: Our plan for the year is to formally launch our reverse-pitch program, which many cities have modeled successfully. Our take on the reverse-pitch program is that it’s also going to serve as a formal process or gatekeeper for all of our departments in city government that want to engage in smart cities. Collectively as a government, we want to have conversations with potential service solution providers and do it in a way where we all understand the benefits, where we all have to support each other in the pilot, and then scale it up. In doing so, we are not overextending our resources and we’re not committing each other to work that we don’t have the capacity to do or that would conflict with another pilot.
So, when potential partners file grant applications and they are looking for us to test a solution, we have the same procedures to follow, so we know the commitments, the funding strategy, the resources to utilize and the time frames. Our smart cities director and staff will manage that. At some point, we’re going to need to commit more resources to it, because this could really be a high-functioning program for us.
