Building Data-Smart City Solutions
Consultant: STEERING
Copyright: SSMIC
Introduction
Huge amounts of public data are collected every day but very little is used to its full potential.
Why?
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Data is an invaluable asset to municipalities. It has the power to positively influence service delivery, program outcomes and public policy. Public health organizations can leverage data to stop the spread of fatal diseases and inform the public about impending, widespread health concerns. Timely data can guide decisions on emergency response planning and public safety. The data that lives in the very fabric of a community can guide the equitable delivery of public services to its citizens, respond to investment queries to stimulate economic development and inform policy decisions on infrastructure planning, housing, education, energy and many other areas.
Okay, this might not be a well-kept secret. But it doesn’t answer why many cities are not taking a more analytical approach to address community challenges using the reams of public data that exists within each department and community organization.
Major challenges for communities to leverage public data for public good are divisions of municipal government and that community organization tend to be siloed. Many cities don’t have the resources or interdepartmental continuity to work on new solutions together - the hurdle isn’t the availability of data, but the willingness to share it. Silos within organizations can stunt the flow of ideas and impede community leaders from implementing new, innovative business models. This can open the door for private investors or vendors to tout ‘smart city’ technology that favours shareholders over good public policy.
It’s been proven that these silos can be broken down.
In Canada, there’s an innovative Northern Ontario city proving that great things can be accomplished when community partnerships are developed between municipal entities. They are proving that when silos are broken down and multi-enterprise data is unified, layered and disseminated as data-smart solutions, there is serious public value that can be realized.
“When you have towers and smartphones, then you get portable ubiquity. When you break up a smartphone into its separate sensors, switches, and little radios, then you get the internet of things. This is not smart cities, this is digital stardust.”
– Bruce Sterling
American Science Fiction Author
​Acorn Information Solutions (Acorn), a division of the Sault Ste. Marie Innovation Centre (SSMIC) has become a pioneer in sharing, integrating and analyzing public information and spatial data for public good. With over 60 community partners including public, private and non-profit organizations, Acorn has developed the world’s first Community Information Utility (CIU), an advanced Geographic Information Systems (GIS) functioning solution, community data trust and information management tool.
As a non-profit organization, Acorn serves by leveraging CIU data to provide data-smart solutions to public and private sector organizations. Over the past 19 years, Acorn used the CIU to provide over 1000 unique solutions for over 200 clients.
This case study documents the history behind the Community Information Utility; Acorn Information Solutions’ roadmap to success; how the city’s community data trust and data-smart city solutions are being relied on to provide impactful solutions to residents; and it distils Sault Ste. Marie’s story of innovative accomplishments and best practices so other communities can benefit from them.
Project Background
It started with a crisis
In the late 90s unemployment in Sault Ste. Marie was rising to harrowing levels while the Northern Ontario city’s resource-based economy was in steep decline. The results of this economic downturn had rippled through the community with layoffs set to impact thousands of households, stunting economic advancement for local businesses caught in the crossfire.
With a population of 75,000 and countless jobs hinging on the success of Algoma Steel and the forestry industry, there was a glaring reality that economic diversification was needed to bring new life of an economy under siege.
To diversify the local economy, the municipal government, under the leadership of former Mayor Steve Butland, invested $1 million to initiate the creation of the Sault Ste. Marie Innovation Centre (SSMIC), a not-for-profit entity with a mandate to expand the local economy in the area of Information Technology (IT). SSMIC developed three areas of focus: business incubation for start-up IT companies, support for small and medium-sized IT companies and ITrelated market development projects.
The SSMIC project was an investment for the city akin to the creation of an industrial park with an initial overreaching goal of keeping money and IT jobs in the community that were relocating to larger urban centres. The activities of SSMIC would be separate from ongoing municipal economic development activities and insulate Sault Ste. Marie’s Economic Development Corporation (EDC) if the Innovation Centre failed.
“There are many places in the world that have faced dramatic challenges. In fact, adversity, itself, became the platform upon which they built sustainable economies.”
– Frank McKenna,
three-term Premier of New Brunswick1
A community with a shared vision
Before the creation of SSMIC, Sault Ste. Marie’s water and electric utilities commission, PUC Services Inc. (PUC) and its leadership were looking at new and innovative solutions of their own to improve operational efficiencies and replace a dated asset management system. The vision was to create a comprehensive GIS-based solution that housed layers of critical infrastructure data for the city’s water and electrical systems, providing readily available geographical reference points to all of the PUC’s assets. This comprehensive, deep database design was envisioned to have connectivity right
to the meter level to provide power outage management among other operational benefits.
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One notable characteristic of the PUC’s GIS design was to create a community-based product with open access to community users where common use data could be transferred with ease to and from the municipality. This would bridge potential gaps in the workflow for projects where the City and PUC were involved.
It was clear, the heart of PUC’s vision for an advanced GIS solution was to improve service outcomes for the community while moving to a new and more efficient way of doing business.
Concurrently, and somewhat by chance, with the formation of SSMIC and the PUC’s interest in integrating a GIS solution, the City of Sault Ste. Marie was also exploring a GIS project of their own. Both organizations were on parallel paths and set to hire consulting firms to implement separate, multi-year enterprise GIS solutions.
In the 90s GIS was gaining popularity among organizations as a way to capture, manipulate, store, analyze and manage data. At this time, the technology and software were developing rapidly and Esri, the most eminent GIS technology developers globally, had debuted their first desktop GIS solution called ArcMap and were working on developing a more advanced solution that key sectors such as governments, non-government bodies and utilities could use to house and share critical data sets.
The city and SSMIC saw these conditions of need and emerging technology as an opportunity to marry the City and Utility’s projects to create the Innovation Centre’s first IT market development project.
This initiative would eventually lead to the most advanced GIS solution in Canada and the creation of North America’s first Community Information Utility (CIU).​
The Value Proposition
and municipal buy-in: The inception of a
Community Information
Utility
The initial value proposition for a shared GIS model was deeply rooted in creating efficiencies for service delivery from the municipality and water/electric utility to citizens while deriving savings through development cost-sharing with multiple stakeholders. The methodology behind the then named Integrated Geomatics System (IGS) was to collect and store pertinent spatial data within SSMIC from all stakeholders, and redistribute the information in a way that created solutions for the public while maintaining data privacy. The main benefits included:
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A total reduction in GIS development costs,hardware and software costs, and cost of operational resources.
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Improved service delivery by municipal staff to the public through access to information.
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A data-sharing model to improve perfomance for all stakeholders.
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Access to data to support future economic development opportunities.
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Outsourcing of data collection, data modelling, and GIS operations to SSMIC to allow stakeholders to focus on core competencies rather than IT.
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City GIS information would be used to serve all taxpayers in the community and not focus solely on internal needs.
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The outsiders
SSMIC’s approach to the GIS project was to engage outside consulting firms that could provide a knowledge transfer and seed local GIS expertise in Sault Ste. Marie while implementing one GIS solution for the City and PUC.
In 1999, EDS Canada, Esri Canada, TerraViva and JD Barnes were contracted for two years to initiate the GIS implementation and provide training and knowledge transfer to locally hired staff. The Sault Ste. Marie Innovation Centre’s newly formed GIS group were made up of a junior team originally led by Mario Chabot of EDS Canada.
At the time of implementation, one major challenge that Chabot and his team faced was that the technology necessary to carry out such an advanced GIS solution was unproven. Esri’s latest technology, ArcMap, was in its infancy but was critical to the project as its functionality allowed for the capture and storing of data in an object-oriented approach to provide a functional representation of the real world. The success of GIS comes not from the implementation of the technology but the ability to build location capacity in which solutions can be derived. The capacity available through ArcMap was needed to house the intelligence of the GIS system. “The timing was important because we couldn’t do this project with the old technology,” said Chabot. “That’s why we took a chance. New architecture allowed us to move ahead with the plan.”
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Along with a penchant for risk, Chabot also brought over EDS’s project management approach which was critical to the success of the implementation of SSMIC’s shared GIS solution. EDS shaped SSMIC’s junior staff and trained them in all aspects of project management including risk management, project administration, communications and human resources. Most significant was EDS’s emphasis on quality control management in the collection of data and development of data models.
About two years into the project, external consultants were phased out and the project went forth with local SSMIC staff. This marked the inception of Acorn Information Solutions, a program of SSMIC and innovator in data-smart city solutions.
“The quality control management was critical to a project like this for which the goal was extremely accurate data. Any similar project requires a similar approach to project management”
– Paul Beach
Manager, Acorn Information Solutions
1 Bruce, Alec. 2013. To Be Perfectly Frank. Atlantic Business Magazine, March/April.
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2 Lewin, Matthew. Esri Canada. May 2, 2017. Governance for GIS: Decisions and decision-making [Blog post]. Retrieved from
https://resources.Esri.ca/news-and-updates/ governance-for-gis-decisions-and-decision-making
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