Municipalities need to provide various geospatial services to citizens and third-party organizations. For example Urban planning and zoning, infrastructure and asset management, public safety, environmental management, property and tax assessment and historic preservation.

Municipalities also host large volumes of national data that need to be shared with other organizations such as citizen registrations and buildings.

Some municipalities do not have a dedicated IT and infrastructure team to manage their own IT infrastructure. So they need an external organization to take care of their IT environment for them.

There is a knowledge gap between GIS staff of a municipalities and IT system designers. GIS specialist they dont have IT knowledge to design systems. For example they dont know what cloud provider suits them the best? How many servers they need? How many databases they need? How to design network and so on.

IT people, on the other hand, don’t have the knowledge of GIS systems. They dont know what operating system is the best for GIS apps? What are the main tiers of a GIS system design? What are the requirements of the software? And what should be the specs of the server.

As an experienced and certified GIS System Designer and Cloud Architect. I can fill in the gap. I know about the GIS systems and their requirements and I know about the IT infrastructure. So I can design the whole IT infrastructure for the project, communicate to the IT team what infrastructure they need to prepare and communicate to GIS managers what they need to order.

For SSC kempen , I designed a high-available, fail-proof GIS infrastructure. Municipalities have critical processes and data. System down-time will cause a chain reaction and disrupts the process in many collaborating organizations. This comes with a huge cost for the municipality and other organizations. After the design was complete the specs of the servers were defined and ordered to SSC kempen. Here I made sure that the specs of the servers are cost effective for the municipality while maintaining the performance for the end user. It is an experimental process that after years of trial and error with various experiments one can define the optimal specs for the server.

Now the SSC knows quantitative and qualitative aspects of infrastructure such as the amount of servers, the specs of servers, type and size of databases, network topology, load balancers, firewalls and rules.

After system was designed and infrastructure was ready, its time for deployment and implementation. This consist of several steps:

1. Prepare the systems
2. Install the software
3. Configuration
4. Test

During this step, necessary components of the servers must be setup. For example IIS, firewall setting, service accounts, permissions, server features.

In this project, because there were several municipalities to be serviced, this process was automated using powershell scripts to increase the speed of the work.

After acquiring software and licenses from providers (Esri, VertiGIS) it was time to install the software. The software installation was also automated with command lines and powershell scripts to speed up the process.

After the software is installed, post-install configuration is necessary to make sure different components work together. For example database needs to be connected to desktop software and gis servers. The GIS server needs to be connected to web servers. Web adapters needs to be installed and proxies need to be setup. This process was also automated using commandline tools.

Perhaps the most underestimated component of GIS system design is system test afterwards. According to experience I know many architects who had deployed services for clients but the systems could not meet the performance requirements. As a result users were unhappy. This happens mostly because lack of automated testing and benchmarking in GIS systems. What I do differently from other organizations is that I run various load tests after deployment to simulate the practical load of users.

If the test results are acceptable, then the software is delivered to the client. Otherwise scaling up and scaling out scenarios are performed. This is a very important step and guarantees user satisfaction for a long time.

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