Two Different Orders and Programs/Platforms

The City of Salinas recently developed their open data platform: http://cityofsalinas.org/data. It holds over 60 city-wide datasets. The goal is to eliminate storage and on-premise infrastructure while providing enhanced indexing, retrieval, data management, and presentation features. They also have their own Geographic Information Systems (GIS) program. Both of which required strategic consulting.

In Need of Experienced Consultants

The City of Salinas sought an experienced GIS Strategic Planning Consultant to conduct an assessment of the current state of the City’s GIS program, facilitate comprehensive needs assessment interviews, outline best practices, and provide recommendations to more efficiently and effectively utilize GIS as a key business system within the organization. In addition, but separate from GIS, a city-wide business assessment that will allow City staff to begin development of a Performance Management program was also required. Furthermore, their open data platform required support in strategic consulting to develop the requirements for said platform.

Xentity helped develop the requirements for the City of Salinas’ open data platform. This included validating functional requirements, technology considerations, project management requirements, infrastructure requirements and scoring criteria. For GIS related work, Xentity surveyed each division’s business processes with respect to existing GIS needs and future opportunities over the next 5-10 years based on industry trends, creating an organizational GIS needs assessment. Xentity also provided enterprise GIS data review to assess the quality, quantity, organization, and completeness of the City’s existing enterprise GIS databases. Finally, we provided strategies to integrate GIS systems with other major enterprise business systems,

Integrated GIS and a Deployed Open Data Platform

These two projects had two major outcomes for the City of Salinas. Our GIS-related efforts have helped the city integrate GIS with its major enterprise business systems. These integrations into these systems add a spatial component that unfortunately had been lacking before. Also, through our provision of strategic consulting for the city’s open data platform, the platform can provide an intuitive user experience. One that provides enhanced searching and filtering, data and interactive visualizations, metadata availability and much more.