cityofboston.gov - Official Web Site of the City of Boston - Thomas M. Menino, Mayor

GIS Base Map Development

The City has not updated its base map or planimetric layers in a global manner since 1994.  We are currently working with a vendor on the production of new city-wide 4-band color and color infrared orthophotography, detailed 40-scale planimetrics, and 1’ contours based on Spring 2011 aerial digital photography. Planimetric features collected include street centerlines, building footprints, boundary features, utility features, vegetation, and hydrography. The City has had constant change over the past 15 years. In addition, some areas of the City need GIS to fuel many of the data requirements necessary to maintain infrastructure. Both our CAD (Computer Aided Dispatch) and Asset Management projects will greatly benefit from this new data set.

SAM (Street and Address Management)

This project proposes to build on the existing master address management work completed over the last two years.  The SAM (Street and Address Management) system currently integrates parcel, street addresses and existing official street names.  This next phase would integrate PWD Highway and PIC’s business processes with SAM so that street name and centerline geometry would be managed through SAM. This would give all participating departments’ immediate access to any street name or geometry changes including name changes or the addition of new streets.  Current participating departments are ISD and Assessing.  They have a great need to have access to this information in a consistent and timely manner.  This project will result in an integrated set of software tools that will tie the PWD street centerlines with the SAM system.  The Public Improvement Commission (PIC) is the approving authority for any changes to street names, new streets, or abandoning existing streets.  Other City departments currently get notified by mail.  This process is inefficient and often results in inconsistent edits reflected in these departments line of business systems. Changes to street names and geometry will be reflected in Sam and made available to any other City Department using SAM for addressing.  Currently this is Assessing and ISD but the goal is that SAM will be the enterprise master address repository for the City.

Asset Management

Maximo Asset Management delivers a comprehensive view of all asset types across the enterprise. This holistic perspective will allow us to see all of our assets, as well as identify all of the untapped potential within them. The City will gain the knowledge and control needed to closely align its organization's goals with the overall goals of its business. To help maximize return on assets, Maximo Asset Management will enable us to develop comprehensive programs for preventive, predictive, routine and unplanned maintenance.

The City hopes to realize the following advantages from deployment of Maximo EAM across the Enterprise:

• Improve return on assets,
• Decrease costs and risk,
• Increase productivity,
• Improve asset-related decision making,
• Increase asset service delivery responsiveness and revenue,
• Facilitate regulatory compliance efforts,
• Lower total cost of ownership.

The initial phase will be the implementation of Maximo EAM in BPL, BFD and the Street Lighting Division of PWD.  Maximo Spatial will also be implemented to provide integration between the City’s GIS and Maximo.  This will help PWD plan, schedule and perform work more effectively.  An interface to Lagan CRM will also be included to leverage the existing capacity of Lagan for receiving external service requests for street light related issues.  The next phases of implementation will be with School Department, Department of Neighborhood Development and Property Management.

City Worker Application 2.0

In 2011, the City launched City Worker, an internal mobile app that helps the City’s field staff respond quicker and more efficiently to constituent requests. The app is directly tied to the City’s CRM system.  Piloted with the arborists of the Parks & Recreation Department, this app coincided with a 17% increase in productivity, as arborists were able to do more tree pruning and tree removal inspections each day aided by the app’s mapping and record-keeping functionality.

This fall, City Worker 2.0 will be launched with the City’s Public Works Department.  Building on the original version, 2.0 will allow Public Works inspectors to not only manage their case load but also close and update existing cases and create new ones.  Further, 2.0 allows both constituents and city managers to set work requests.  So far, 50 field workers are using the application.  The app is scalable for all of our service-oriented departments. Our Transportation Department is already in the planning stages for utilizing the app for its field staff.

Business Relationship Management

Leveraging our existing enterprise permitting process, Boston Business Hub will revolutionize the way that we interface with businesses. It provides a single point of contact for businesses interested in coming to or growing in Boston. Businesses gain access to information about funding opportunities, potential properties and the permitting process. By consolidating multiple instances of Salesforce.com, we’ll be able to log and track requests, share information between agencies, cut costs and improve service. Our first major investment in cloud technology will allow us to take advantage of existing similar development, which could lead to significant cost savings in the future.

Boston Business Hub

Data Warehouse

Building off our successful launch of the GIS Data Hub, the City of Boston is working to develop a 'data warehouse' which will be populated with enterprise-wide data sets from across the City of Boston.  The Data Warehouse will serve as a single point of contact for researchers, businesses, constituents, and other external parties interested in any of the City's data sets.  It also is used to power some of our more recent projects, including the newly launched Boston About Results (BAR) metric tool and the Boston Business Hub.  The Data Warehouse is:

• A collection of integrated databases designed to support managerial decision-making and problem-solving functions;

• A collection of both highly detailed and summarized historical data relating to various categories, subjects, or areas such as Constituent Service, Permitting, Inspections, Public Safety, Operations, etc.;
• An integral part of an enterprise-wide decision support system, which empowers selected end-users to perform data access and analysis;
• Reduces the need (streamlines) for DoIT to perform technical programming to access and combine data from different databases for end-users to perform various analysis; and
• Gives us all many operational advantages, such as: promoting a culture of information sharing, enabling employees to effectively and efficiently solve dynamic organizational problems, and minimizes the need for and impact of technical processing by DoIT for data analysis and reporting.  

Boston About Results (BAR)

Boston About Results is the product of our work on developing an innovative tool that allows the public to track City performance by drilling into key departmental performance measures such as crime rates in the police department, graduation rates in schools, or the percent of operational parking meters in the transportation department.  It also allows citizens to track administrative measures of government efficiency such as overtime rates and employee absences and see how these effect departmental budgets.

For example, the public works scorecard shows how the percent of streetlight outage complaints resolved in 10 days or less has shot up from 44% in early 2010 to 84% today.  By relentless tracking streetlight performance data the department was able to identify better ways of routing streetlight repair crews and has also prioritized the installation of LED streetlights to reduce outages and save costs.

The streetlight division’s commitment to timeliness of service mirrors the citywide effort to focus on those results most important to the people of Boston.  A citizen can now log a complaint with the City and then turn to the BAR website to see just how well the City responds to complaints of this type – effectively closing the loop with citizens. 

Similarly the Police Department’s scorecard shows that the number of serious Part I crimes has declined by 8% in 2011 compared with the same period in 2010.  The BPD owes this success, in part, to its aggressive crime and intelligence data tracking.  Every other week the senior commanders of the BPD meet to review the recent performance of their District Captains and to hold them accountable for reducing crime in their districts.

The new interactive scorecards are part of the BAR program’s overall performance strategy which seeks to answer three core questions:

1. What is city government doing?

2. How well is are we doing it? 

3. How can it do it better? 

The interactive BAR scorecards also allow users to:

• View the mission statements of each department or program,
• Graph the historical trend in on any key performance measure,
• Compare up-to-date results against the strategic goal of each measure,
• Track administrative measures of government efficiency, and 
• Chart the budget for each department.

Boston About Results

Student Opportunities Exchange Portal

The Student Opportunities Exchange Portal is a one-stop website which connects city employees with students interested in either city internships or academic pursuits. The concise online application process helps both internship seekers and department managers find potential matches, and its simplicity speeds up the internship search for both parties.

Student Opportunities Exchange

Procurements Portal

Obtaining information regarding procurements, requests for proposals and qualifications (RFP, RFQ) was disjointed and inefficient for both the city and interested businesses.  There were several departments that had their own web sites (Schools, Parks, Police, and Fire) for posting RFPs (requests for proposals).  This caused confusion for businesses.  The City had procurement applications built for specific departments rather than a scalable, city-wide model which also relied heavily on having paper copies available for interested parties.  City departments spent extra time and money printing out revised version and businesses had to send couriers to pick up the new versions. People were forced to search for RFPs on several sites in order to find available projects.  To resolve these inefficiencies, DoIT has made a single, city-wide procurement application.

Benefits:

• Single point of contact for end users.  Users don’t have to go to multiple sites (physical and virtual) to find/ track RFPs;
• Departments save money by not having to print out thousands of copies a year that may or may not get used.  New copies have to be printed when project specifications change which can double or even triple the amount  of copies needed;
• Because users have to provide personal information before viewing projects, they can now be notified quickly when details of a project have changed;
• Companies (end users) don’t have to pay to send couriers to pick up project packets from departments;
• One application to manage citywide means more efficient use of IT support resources; and 
• Zero cost solution  (Built in house by our development team).
  

Features:

• Upload corresponding files to a particular project.
• Set date and times for when project is viewable by public on the website
• Users must submit information before they are able to view details of any project.  This allows the City to track usage as well as contact end-users when specifications change.
• Viewable statistics.  See how many times the project packets where downloaded/viewed as well as by whom.

Procurements Portal