Environment Canterbury Information Systems staff have won two awards in November, including one for a highly successful crisis mapping GIS site during the aftermath of the September 4 earthquake. The team won the Eagle Excellence in GIS 2010 Award and ALGIM Excellence in Innovation Award 2010.

The Eagle Excellence New Zealand wide award was received for their ‘Crisis mapping in an emergency’ entry and the ALGIM Innovation award for ‘One View' utilising our new GIS mapping system and customer relationship management (CRM) system.

Crisis mapping in an emergency: The Information Systems GIS team created an online mapping system which documented real time information on incidents following the earthquake.

Within 24 hours of the earthquake, the GIS team had both internal and external websites available, showing areas of damage, emergency callouts, post-earthquake satellite and aerial photos.

Jackie Curtis, director external relations, said the award is well deserved recognition of a team that showed innovation and fast thinking in a tough and stressful time.

“Our GIS team worked non stop to get the incident map up and running quickly after the earthquake.

“The online map attracted 6.5 millions hits in the first three days after the earthquake and proved an extremely valuable tool for the response staff and the community,” she said.

The mapping tool was used by a large number of government agencies and partner agencies providing them with critical sensitive data and proved invaluable for the Canterbury Civil Defence Emergency Management Group Emergency Co-ordination Centre to keep everyone up to date with a range of information.

Two members of the Information Systems GIS team will attend the ESRI International Users conference in San Diego, California in 2011 as their prize for the Eagle Excellence award.

The public map can be seen at: http://s1.demos.eaglegis.co.nz/Flex/earthquake-christchurch/

‘One View’ of the location/customer: An internal initiative for staff, the vision of ‘One View’ comes from combining the new internal GIS system and CRM to provide an overall picture of each of Environment Canterbury’s customers.

“It means the organisation is able to hold all information in one location for each customer making it much easier to gather and store details,” said Ms Curtis.

“When a person calls in with an enquiry, staff have a fast reference to the person’s past enquiries and details, the layers of information make it quick and easy for the staff member to get just one view of the person calling.

“These awards for local government best practice give our Information Systems team a strong recognition by their peers of the value of ‘One View’ project.

“This is a wonderful acknowledgement of the work they have completed in this area and the high calibre of that work,” said Ms Curtis.

ENDS

© Scoop Media