City of Surrey COSMOS

In March 2005, Surrey, BC launched its “COSMOS” (City of Surrey Mapping Online System). This new eGovernment service is part of the City’s continuous effort to offer easy and convenient access to City information via the Internet.

“By making this information available on the website, we have lowered our delivery costs and increased its availability to everyone,” said Mayor Doug McCallum on behalf of City Council. “COSMOS is a good example of how we can use technology to increase our level of service to our residents and business community.”

The implementation of COSMOS reflects a best practices review of various Canadian and US cities, research of customer needs and expectations, technology needs, preparation of GIS data, and detailed acceptance testing.

Previously, City of Surrey staff had used a custom, desktop-based ArcView 3.x application for many years. While this first-generation COSMOS viewer was popular with most users, the technology foundation had limitations and was becoming increasingly difficult to support. In 2004, City of Surrey selected ESRI Canada and Latitude Geographics to build new ArcIMS-based COSMOS applications for internal staff and public users.

“In our experience, replacing desktop-based GIS implementations with web-based technology is the highest risk type of implementation,” explains Colin Doak, a project manager at Latitude Geographics, “Because experienced day-to-day users are, quite understandingly, unwilling to give up any functionality that their previous desktop-based toolkit provided—while still expecting many new features.”

While the project team carefully planned to offer most of the features from the original COSMOS, the provision of ArcView-style editable callout boxes was deferred because the internal needs assessment did not reveal them to be essential tools for the first release. Unfortunately, some staff did in fact use call-out boxes on a daily basis, and the importance of these tools became immediately apparent during acceptance testing. GIS Manager Sean Simpson quickly commissioned the development of ArcView-style callout boxes, and the rapid delivery timeline satisfied the affected users. “The initial absence of this feature impacted the willingness of some users to adopt the new system,” noted Simpson. “It made us glad we’d performed such a comprehensive internal needs assessment.”

Today, the intranet application receives approximately 120,000 requests per month, while the public application receives about 200,000 requests per month—with growth of approximately 5-10% per month for both applications.

Future enhancements planned for COSMOS include an eBusiness extension that will provide a self-serve option to download digital GIS data, further strengthening the city’s commitment to being ‘Open for Business’.

COSMOS can be accessed through the City’s website, www.surrey.ca or directly at http://cosmos.surrey.ca.

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