This article was written regarding work conducted under legacy company names: Continental Mapping, GISinc, or TSG Solutions. These three companies merged in January 2021 to form a new geospatial leader Axim Geospatial.
When the City of San Mateo, California chose to migrate to Esri’s GIS software from Intergraph, a primary objective for them was to establish alignment with the ArcGIS for Local Government solutions to aid succession planning. Their goal was that establishing a widely used data schema would aid in recruiting quality future staff. In the past, the City struggled with organizing its spatial data from a variety of locations and formats. Improving the addressing and fire planning processes and supporting an ongoing permitting system implementation provided the initial motivations.
The first phase of the project was to implement Esri’s Address Data Management template. Axim Geospatial performed the necessary planning and created the ETL necessary to migrate the City’s current data into the ArcGIS for Local Government data model. Through a remote knowledge transfer, we loaded the City’s SDE database and taught their staff how to use Esri’s editing tools in a versioned editing environment. A similar process was used for the Pre-Incident Planning of emergency services. Though the next planned step was to implement the Planning and Notification application, the City chose instead to perform a full adoption of the ArcGIS for Local Government model upon which to build its EnerGov permitting system. In this final project phase, we assisted the migration of over 30 priority layers into the LGIM database, including extending the model for layers that were not a good match. To support a single data repository, more than 120 layers were eventually migrated into the central database.
The ease of use of the Addressing and the Pre-Incident editing templates encouraged the City’s users to more broadly adopt the ArcGIS for Local Government data model. This has allowed them to establish a single, central data repository built upon a widely used standard to support their permitting system. They also anticipate new users will require less time to learn the data model than their previous ad hoc structure. The staff hired with previous ArcGIS for Local Government experience will improve the future transition, a key element for their succession planning. The City plans to resume implementation of the ArcGIS for Local Government planning applications in a future project phase.
