The City of Englewood, Colorado is a vibrant, art-centered, accessible suburban area located near Denver, Colorado. Open government and transparency of information are important goals for the City. To support these goals, the City provides a wide array of mapping applications designed to assist staff and citizens in finding specific geographic information about their community. This level of service requires a reliable and secure enterprise Geographic Information System (GIS) that is both internal- and public-facing and takes advantage of the City’s existing geospatial technology investment.
While the City’s GIS was functioning as an organization-wide system, it was operating on an earlier version of the Esri software suite and lacked several critical components needed for a true enterprise GIS. All of the components of an enterprise GIS are interrelated, interact with, and depend on each other for the system to be operationally sound. If one or more of these system components is deficient, then the entire system may not operate at an optimal level. For that reason, all parts of the enterprise GIS must be well-designed, integrated, and up to date in order to leverage its full potential.
Englewood needed expertise in deploying, upgrading, and migrating content to a new enterprise GIS. Having worked with Geographic Technologies Group (GTG) on previous projects, the City knew that GTG is a world-class GIS consulting organization that supports local governments with enterprise GIS services and solutions. In early 2020, GTG was asked to provide GIS system architecture design and implementation services to the City because the company is constantly collaborating, evolving, and expanding to ensure the best customer experience for their clients. An enterprise GIS can be defined as “a geographic information system that is integrated through an entire organization so that a large number of users can manage, share, and use spatial data and related information to address a variety of needs, including data creation, modification, visualization, analysis, and dissemination.” GTG designed an enterprise GIS platform to meet the current and upcoming needs of the City of Englewood that is sustainable, cost-effective, and delivers exceptional services to the GIS community.
The City of Englewood’s GIS leverages Esri’s ArcGIS Enterprise platform to deliver distributed, organization-wide GIS services to the government, its partners, and its residents. As part of this project, the components of ArcGIS Enterprise 10.7.1 — ArcGIS for Server, Portal for ArcGIS, ArcGIS Data Store, ArcGIS Web Adaptor, ArcGIS Monitor – were installed and configured on City servers based on the aforementioned architecture design. The organization had a primary enterprise geodatabase running on Microsoft SQL Server that was also upgraded to version 10.7.1. The ArcGIS Data Store was installed and registered as the site’s managed data store, and the ArcGIS Server site was federated with Portal for ArcGIS.
Englewood’s GIS adheres to Esri’s Web GIS design pattern, which follows industry and GTG best practices for workload separation, horizontal scalability, and service-oriented architecture (SOA). To achieve workload separation, the City’s GIS system follows the multi-tiered principle of system architecture by isolating the web, application, and database tiers across the servers.
- The Web Tier is responsible for handling HTTP/HTTPS requests to the GIS through the ArcGIS Web Adaptor.
- The Application Tier is responsible for exposing services and providing functionality for the GIS through ArcGIS Server and Portal for ArcGIS.
- The Database Tier is responsible for the storage and retrieval of spatial data for the GIS through the ArcGIS Data Store and SDE Geodatabase.
By April 2020, the updated enterprise GIS was deployed successfully on-premise at the City of Englewood and their GIS is now operating full throttle. The GIS system architecture was designed and built to accommodate future GIS efforts, align the city with Esri’s product development, increase the capacity and capabilities of the GIS, and improve the experience of both internal and external GIS customers. With these updates and improvements, Englewood now has a modern, performant, and scalable enterprise GIS that meets all the City’s requirements.
The City’s GIS and Information Technology team has been very pleased with all they accomplished. They have been trained on how to perform common workflow tasks to manage the system going forward, and GTG remains available to provide support as needed. Together, the City and GTG partnered to deploy a modern, scalable, and value-driven GIS to support the organization and its partners now and into the future.
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To learn more about ArcGIS Implementation and GIS Services from Geographic Technologies Group, please feel free to reach out. You can speak to our team by calling 888.757.4222 or emailing moreinfo@geotg.com.
