Douglas McBratney, City of Lake Forest
Developing a useful and relevant GIS system at a contract city presents special challenges. Overall budgets and staff levels are lower that at full-service cities of an equivalent population. Fewer internal users make a GIS harder to justify and require an enterprise-wide GIS vision and strong stakeholders. Responsibilities for data maintenance need to be shared among departments. GIS efforts need to be coordinated, controlled, and managed without dedicated full time staff to do it. In these circumstances, implementation of an enterprise GIS will need to take a slow but steady approach over several years. The City of Lake Forest, incorporated in 1991, began a successful multi-year GIS implementation in 2005 that is ongoing. This presentation will discuss where and how Lake Forest began to think GIS, how GIS was originally envisioned, the initial ArcGIS single-user database implementation and success, the period of dashed expectations, reassessment, and finally enterprise implementation with ArcGIS Server. The wrap-up will cover lessons learned by Lake Forest that might help other agencies looking in a similar direction for enterprise GIS.