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City wins award for achievement in geographic information system

Jul 15, 2022 | 12:32 PM

The City of Medicine Hat stood out in a crowded geographic information system technology field at a tech conference in San Diego this week.

The City of Medicine Hat earned the Esri Special Achievement in GIS (SAG) Award at the 2022 Esri User Conference. The city is the only Canadian recipient in 2022 and just the second Alberta company to win in the award’s history.

Medicine Hat was recognized for improving enterprise asset management through GIS and establishing an integrated GIS strategy for the city, resulting in significant time and money savings and positioning the city to drive further efficiencies across its operations.

“The City of Medicine Hat’s win demonstrates that a deeply integrated approach using GIS across the organization has resulted in doing more with less and has positioned them to meet the challenges of a fast-changing environment,” says Alex Miller, president of Esri Canada, in a statement.

In 2021, the city completed the adoption of a comprehensive, scalable system, the GIS-based Cityworks Asset Management solution, which allows staff to proactively plan and maintain infrastructure assets from wastewater pipes to park furniture and streetlights, the city explains. Managers can now instantly share existing and upcoming asset management activities, and workers can track and follow their tasks in the office and in the field.

The city says it is engaging GIS-based solutions across departments, sharing and leveraging location data as part of city planning decisions like designing the infrastructure capacity for new neighbourhoods, supporting Emergency Management during events of scale and determining the optimal location for new fire halls. As well, the team has built roadmaps for future GIS enhancements, from improvements in governance to the implementation of new online dashboards for monitoring operations.

For more on the Esri Special Achievement in GIS Awards, visit the conference website.