Cost Saving Approach to GIS Deployment

Like many small to medium sized water utilities, the Olivenhain Municipal Water District (OMWD) was faced with an ever-increasing burden of information management. In particular, maintenance of mapping systems was not only time consuming, but the pace in which changes were made and disseminated was greatly outpaced by the rate of growth in the area. The traditional method of dealing with this problem is the development of a Geographic Information System (GIS).In the case of OMWD, staffing and budgetary constraints eliminated the possibility of creating a GIS department within the organization. This paper is a case study of the unique and economical way that OMWD staff used to create a fully functional web based GIS at a fraction of the cost of the traditional methods. The end result is a savings of 80% off the cost of deploying and maintaining traditional GIS.