According to Himes, when he began his role with the city, the goal was to develop and implement a comprehensive IT Master Plan to dictate how the city would centralize all services and leverage GIS to enhance reporting, transparency, and performance management. After examining different options, Himes selected ArcGIS Online, Esri's web-based mapping software, because it offered multiple access points for GIS novices as well as city personnel with more familiarity.
"I needed to find a better common denominator, and that's where Esri was top of mind. It's just what scale of Esri did we need and what type of Esri product did we need," explains Himes.
The initial part of this project was the migration to ArcGIS Online from the previous software provider. All the stored data was still in a readable format in the third-party web application, and Blue Raster needed to convert it into a cloud-based GIS. Andrew Patterson, a GIS analyst with Blue Raster, says team members began by taking an inventory of all the data that had been delivered to them. Then, they went through the process of publishing the data and organizing it by department in ArcGIS Online. Overall, close to 100 GIS layers were migrated.
Blue Raster then began doing a one-for-one implementation for each city department in need of a geospatial viewer of Manassas Park data. The team had planning meetings with the departments that already had a GIS viewer to get an idea of what their needs were during the transition, such as determining what layers have been available to them and what layers were not in use.
"We then worked through implementing those needs into different ready-made applications using ArcGIS Experience Builder, so that from the [users'] standpoint, they have a named user, and they sign on to the same link every single time. It never changes, no matter how much we update it," says Patterson.