Last December, the International City/County Management Association (ICMA) helped 10 local government jurisdictions address those details. The organization announced the recipients of its 2002 Pocket P-City pilot projects, which were conducted with corporate partners ESRI and HP, and were designed to address a range of local government services and tasks -- emergency response, IT infrastructure inventory, well and storm water quality, inspections, and infrastructure inventory and repair, among others.
Each of the 10 local governments was supplied with one HP iPAQ and ArcPad 6 (ESRI's mapping and GIS software for mobile systems), with up to 20 deployments supplied by ESRI.
ICMA created the Pocket P-City program to raise awareness of what GIS and mobile devices can do for cities, said Molly Singer, program director of ICMA's technology programs and director of ICMA's GIS Consortium. She also added that ICMA received 91 applications for participation in the project. "For city management, it's really a matter of, 'What's in front of me today?'" she said. "It's ICMA's job to be telling people what they need and what they need to know before they need to know it."
The applications included 73 from cities and townships with population sizes ranging from 5,000 to 8 million, and 16 from counties with populations ranging from 41,000 to 3.2 million, Singer said. Applications covered a variety of uses for mobile GIS, including water resources, emergency response, GASB 34, and basic building and planning inventories.
Share and Share Alike
Preliminary results are encouraging, Singer said, and three jurisdictions -- Grand Rapids, Mich.; Volusia County, Fla.; and Corvallis, Ore. -- were slated to make midterm reports on their projects at an ICMA event held in March.
One of the GIS Consortium's goals is to share the wealth, Singer said. "Everybody's GIS application is going to become publicly accessible and available for sharing, so everybody can use the type of citizen-service software that Grand Rapids is doing, or software behind the type of inspections that Florida has been doing," she said. "The other aspect of these pilot projects is to test the feasibility of mobile government and GIS in terms of the amount of energy put into the project and expense."
Through experiences the pilot jurisdictions had in testing the usability of their applications, other local governments benefit from software that's already been put through its paces.
"We're really looking for that kind of evaluation so when we take a GIS application and show it to the rest of the ICMA membership and local governments abroad, we can say, 'Here are some really good models, and here are some interesting things, but watch out for that application builder,'" she said. "Or jurisdictions might say their application was great for inspections but terrible for customer service."
From the projects, other local governments that wish to use mobile GIS applications will also gain insight for planning their own implementations.
"These are important things to know," she said. "If you just show a local government the glossy product at the end, they'll probably say, 'Oh, I'll buy that.' But then they find out the hard way that they've got to program it."
Improving Customer Service
Grand Rapids, Mich., has fully implemented its pilot program, which looks to improve coordination of work efforts and customer service through the Internet and GIS.
The system will coordinate citizen requests and complaints with service delivery, and manage assignments and responses, said Paul Klimas, GIS administrator of Grand Rapids, adding that iPAQs aren't in the hands of front-line staff yet, but supervisors are testing the devices and software now.
The P-City pilot is one part of an overall shift toward what the city is calling "community oriented government," he said, adding that the GIS component developed through the P-City pilot will be integrated with Internet mapping services, a computerized maintenance-management system and custom document-management software.
"This is just one piece of a multipart customer service programming undertaking," Klimas said. "It was a good opportunity for us to start bringing field activities for customer service into our community oriented government efforts."
Finding the balance between glitzy technologies and applying those technologies in a useful manner is sometimes a difficult thing to do, Klimas said. The desire for new software and applications is always high, but getting those tools into the hands of people who can make the best use of them is where local governments run into trouble.
"Everybody wants mobile right now, and mobile is good," he said. "But where am I going to get effective use of mobile? It can mean anything to any number of people. Mobile, to our police force, means field reporting. When you bring mobile to the public utilities side of things, it's more limited in its use."
The nature of a person's job has to define how the technology is used, designed and deployed, he said, though managing the cultural factor -- how end-users adapt to the change -- is just as important.
"You just can't put a mobile device into their hands," he said. "They won't use it. It will sit in the truck. You have to pick and choose what tool sets you give field staff."
