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ROI of Evolving Your Road Network Data Management Practice

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Return on Investment of Evolving Your Road Network Data Management Practice Esri Canada White Paper 5 existing asset management system focus solely on what it is designed to do and thus be vastly more effective. This approach is proven to work at federal, provincial and state departments of transportation around the world. However, there is a cost to transform the organizations' data management style to achieve this – and this cost can vary depending on how well-established the traditional data management methodology is throughout the organization, and what the strategic objectives of the municipality are. For many, it is worth investing the time and energy to de-clutter, de-duplicate and simplify their municipal road management system. What is the cost? The cost will naturally vary depending on the organization's objectives and how far they are from reaching those objectives. However, we can attempt to identify where in the spectrum an organization will land based on the scope of the impact they wish to achieve. Consider a relatively small government that has strong internal communication across departments. If their primary objective is to be able to more accurately locate assets along the roadway for more meaningful business intelligence and more proactive asset management, then the investment may be quite small. Specifically, all that may be needed is the ability to manage asset data the way we described earlier. In this case, a small configuration change to the GIS could be performed that would allow regular polylines to accommodate measures, known as "polyline-m" features. Since communication is strong throughout the small organization, changes and other edits to these new features could be communicated easily and performed manually by an individual. This naturally would require someone skilled in linear referencing and it is typically the same person who manages the GIS in small environments. Contrast this example to a mid-sized or larger government that has a sprawling organization with teams of people who may not physically work in the same office space. For this type of environment, internal communication is more challenging, and the organization's emphasis would more likely be on improving inter-departmental efficiency. In such a situation, having a single person to manage data changes would be risky, so this organization would want to permit wider access to the authoritative road data and automate many data maintenance tasks. This would be accomplished by a web-based (or server-based) enterprise approach that has a well-defined data management methodology, while still allowing every department to manage their

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