Empowering Site Management Teams Through an Integrated, Collaborative GIS Web Portal

摘要

Site management, the business of managing environmentally impacted properties, is a highly specialized environmental health and safety (EH&S) discipline in which critical decisions about risk assessment, remediation, property use, and development are inextricably linked to geographic location. Nearly every piece of relevant site management data loses meaning when taken outside its spatial context. In past industry practice, the progressive understanding of site parameters was established through preparation and review of copious paper documents. Information was "stranded" in paper notes, tables, charts, and report text. Much information was isolated from geographical and relational contexts. Any available spatial information was isolated in individual paper maps, sometimes poorly reproduced, seldom comparable to other mapped information because of differences in scale and projection. These factors historically have made site data evaluation and decision making unnecessarily slow and costly. Web GIS gives site management stakeholders unprecedented access to critical information within its spatial context. CH2M HILL supported a large cross-enterprise project team at a former aerospace manufacturing facility cleanup with a collaborative site management web portal. The portal serves up GIS; environmental/relational database queries, reporting and downloads; a dynamic document library; and other collaborative applications. The portal significantly streamlined the business processes of site cleanup by: enabling virtual cross-enterprise collaboration; providing an integrated and spatially conformed dataset; making GIS useable and accessible to non-experts; and eliminating paper, copying, shipping, routing, and filing.