City of Bainbridge Island Enterprise GIS Implementation

Meet the Client

The City of Bainbridge Island is a small city of 24,859 people in western Washington state. Although it is located just 35 minutes by ferry from Seattle, the island feels like a small town, featuring a combination of farms, wineries, hiking trails, scenic vistas, and local arts. That’s no coincidence, as shown by this excerpt from the City’s comprehensive plan vision statement: "Bainbridge Island is economically linked to Seattle; however, the artistic, cultural and entrepreneurial spirit of its residents should be encouraged by providing opportunities for environmentally-sound businesses and home occupations."

The Challenge

As in many communities, the City’s operations were heavily disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic in numerous ways—a significant one being staff access to software and data they needed to do their jobs. For some personnel, access to these tools was available only in the office, not from a home computer. This spurred the City to look for a solution that would solve the present issue facing staff as well as resolve three other pain points: GIS data were stored in a variety of places and edited inconsistently, leading to doubts as to which was correct; field data edits were not synced; and the existing public maps created in Esri’s ArcGIS Online had to be kept up to date manually.

The Solution

As a member of the Association of Washington Cities GIS Consortium, the City had access to consulting hours provided by FLO Analytics, a GIS and data analytics consulting services firm and GIS Consortium services provider. The FLO team, along with the City’s IT and GIS staff, worked together to identify options to achieve their goals— providing staff access through an internal portal and public access to information through AGO. FLO recommended an upgrade to the existing Esri Enterprise GIS system to take advantage of the new field tools and applications, bringing it up to par with AGO functionality, performance, and security as well as implementing a centralized geodatabase supporting multiuser editing. The improvements were planned to provide greater data consistency, improve system-wide management, enable more efficient use and sharing of data, and reduce duplication of data across the system.

The upgrade required careful planning and timing, with the software update being carried out during the data schema review, data consolidation, and data migration phases. Because of the age of the existing system, the upgrade had to be done in two steps, which were coordinated with other system improvements, including providing VPN access and upgrading the server. Data were extracted from the existing locations and compiled into authoritative datasets.

During the software upgrade, the City encountered a number of issues that required considerable troubleshooting efforts to resolve with support from the City’s IT department to ensure that no data were lost in the transition. Thanks to robust IT systems and backups, FLO and City staff were able to handle all the various technical issues that came up. Once the upgrade was complete, Esri Enterprise geodatabases were implemented, and new services were established. From there, the previous web maps were rebuilt, and access was rolled out to users, primarily in the Public Works and Planning departments. 

The Results

With the newest version of Enterprise and centralized data storage, the City of Bainbridge Island has a single source of truth for their data, and remote office workers can access and edit the data they need. Public Works field crews now use Survey123, an Esri application for field data collection, and web maps are available to all staff. 

Several City staff are now well-versed in the nuts and bolts of managing and troubleshooting the enterprise system as well, as they were intensely involved in each step of the process. This deep understanding will allow staff to provide peer support to others working with GIS programs and increase the sustainability and usefulness of the Enterprise GIS system.