NOMINATION FORM. Florida Department of Environmental Protection

Transcription

1 NOMINATION FORM Title of Nomination: Project/System Manager: Job Title: Agency: Department: WebPoint John Willmott Chief Information Officer Florida Department of Environmental Protection Bureau of Information Systems Address: 2600 Blair Stone Rd, MS 6520 City: State: Tallahassee Florida Zip: Phone: Fax: Category for judging: 6 - Innovative Use of Technology Person nominating: Job Title: Address: City: State: Jennifer Faul Awards Coordinator 4030 Esplanade Way Tallahassee Florida Zip: Phone: Fax: jennifer.faul@myflorida.com Page 1 of 6

2 ONE-PAGE EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Prior to the advent of GIS and GPS, determining the geographic location of Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP) managed entities was an entirely manual operation and was extremely time-consuming and error-prone. Mapping errors, transcription errors and data entry errors were common. Detecting these errors was also very difficult and expensive. With new GIS and GPS technologies, determining accurate geographic locations became easier, but there were drawbacks. These new technologies required both expensive software and training for GIS tools or costly field trips for GPS tools. In both cases, there was still the potential for the introduction of errors during the data entry (or integration) tasks. WebPoint is a GIS Internet mapping application that enables FDEP staff and delegated County staff to edit and/or verify the location of FDEP managed entities. WebPoint requires no manual data entry and provides the user with an electronic map and aerial photography-based GUI with which recording geographic locations is a point and click operation. WebPoint runs in a standard Internet browser so no additional client software is required. Additionally, WebPoint is a focused application that compliments FDEP business rules, and it requires almost no training. Using WebPoint, knowledgeable staff can manipulate geographic locations from the comfort and efficiency of their offices, avoiding costly and time-consuming field trips. Since WebPoint interacts directly with the GIS and business databases, there is no manual data entry. As a result, typographical and transcription errors are completely eliminated. WebPoint has been in use for approximately 13 months. During this time, 24,114 FDEP managed entities (petroleum storage tanks and hazardous waste sites) have been edited and/or verified. Using WebPoint instead of field trips to edit and/or verify these 24,114 locations has resulted in a savings of approximately $1,7000,000. Since the average edit takes only about 5 minutes, there is a tremendous time savings as well. WebPoint gives FDEP access to highquality data much faster than could be achieved by manual methods. Page 2 of 6

3 Written Justification a) Description of project, including length of time in operation. WebPoint is an Internet mapping application that enables FDEP staff and delegated County staff to edit and verify the geographic location of managed entities using aerial photography and other map layers. WebPoint updates enterprise Oracle tabular and spatial databases on a real-time basis. WebPoint requires no expensive software or training and runs via the Internet and intranet on typical FDEP office PCs over connections from fiber to dial-up. WebPoint is used by FDEP headquarters staff, agency District office staff, and delegated County staff. WebPoint went into production in February b) Significance to the improvement of the operation of government. Prior to the advent of GIS and GPS, determining the geographic location of FDEP managed entities was an entirely manual operation and was extremely time-consuming and error-prone. Mapping errors, transcription errors and data entry errors were common. Detecting these errors was also very difficult and expensive. Using modern GIS Internet mapping tools, the WebPoint focused Internet mapping application enables knowledgeable agency staff to edit and verify existing geographic data from a desktop computer. This eliminates expensive and timeconsuming field trips needed to obtain GPS data in the field. Additionally, since the software accomplishes the data update, transcription and data entry errors are entirely eliminated. c) Benefits realized by service recipients, taxpayers, agency or state. Taxpayers benefit from WebPoint due to the improved accuracy of the geographic location of FDEP managed entities thus enabling better and more informed agency decision-making. The agency benefits from WebPoint as a result of improved operational efficiency (significantly reduced cost per location edited or verified) and reduced errors (due to automatic data update). d) Return on investment, short-term/long-term payback (include summary calculations). Projects must exhibit measurable operational benefit. WebPoint development consumed about 1200 hours of staff effort at a cost of approximately $40,000 (average staff hourly rate of $30 * 1200 hours). The application development effort used existing hardware and software licenses, so no additional hardware or software expenses were incurred. To date, 24,114 storage tank and waste managed entity geographic locations have been edited and/or verified using WebPoint. The average time required editing and/or verifying a geographic location is about 5 minutes per location. To edit and/or verify these 24,114 sites consumed about 2009 hours at an estimated cost of $60,285 (24,114 sites / 12 sites per hour * $30 per hour). The total cost of application development and use for 13 months is approximately $100,285. By contrast, last year a contractor was hired to verify and/or edit the location of 4,022 well sites. This contract entailed creating a database extract for the contractor, contractor-conducted site visits with GPS receivers, a database submission from the contract with the verified locations, and finally a database update. The cost of the contractor work alone (the site visit and database submission) was $301,202. The average cost per geographic location was $ Extrapolating Page 3 of 6

4 this level of cost to 24,114 geographic locations yields a cost of $1,805,656. Thus, WebPoint generated a savings of approximately $1,700,000 in the first 13 months of use. Page 4 of 6

5 Brief Narrative on Hardware and Software WebPoint is an ESRI ArcIMS 3.1 Internet mapping application. The GUI is an HTML-based viewer with extensive JavaScript customization. Business logic is controlled using ASP pages and complied Oracle procedures. Since writes are made to several databases, distributed transaction processing is controlled by the Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS). External (non-fdep) users access WebPoint via a Linux-based reverse proxy server running Squid. Internal users connect directly to one of two Microsoft Internet Information Servers (IIS) running on rack-mounted Dell PowerEdge 1650 Windows 2000 servers. The ESRI ArcIMS mapping application server is running with multiple instances on multiple rack-mounted Dell PowerEdge 1650 Windows 2000 servers. The map layers that enable the users to visually locate FDEP managed entities are served from a Compaq GS-160 (Tru64 Unix) running the ESRI ArcSDE spatial database engine. ArcSDE is running in Oracle. The aerial photography is served from a Windows 2000 host serving file-based MrSID imagery referenced in an image catalog. Page 5 of 6

6 Charts, Graphs, Samples Page 6 of 6