Enthusiastic about enterprise GIS. That describes Bill Oates, chief information officer for the City of Boston, who spent the last several years working with Boston officials, the city's IT team, and with ESRI to set up an enterprise system.

Though there was what he describes as "pockets of innovation around GIS" in Boston city government for many years, many departments were not using the technology, Oates told more than 200 people on Sunday at the 2009 ESRI Senior Executive Seminar in San Diego.

To save money and increase efficiency, in 2007, the city decided to raise the focus on enterprise GIS. "We needed to establish GIS as a service," he said. "We needed to use GIS as an integration platform, and we needed to foster collaboration through GIS across the entire city."

The results from working closely with ESRI? First, the city launched Solar Boston, a public Web site where residents can enter their address and receive data back about potential cost savings of installing solar technology. "You can see the roof space you have, how high that roof space is...(and) how the sun hits you. You are able to calculate how much savings you (will receive) by investing in some of the environmental friendly projects," Oates said.

Last winter, the city also unveiled-on the eve of a major snowstorm-an application called SnowCOP, which gave the public works department a common operational picture to better manage the street clearing operations, Oates said.

Barriers between city departments are breaking down and data sharing is becoming easier as old silo systems are making way for an enterprise GIS, according to Oates. Next month, the City of Boston will release its GIS Data Hub online. Included on the site will be constituent services from the Mayor's office, data about crime and public safety, and information about the federal stimulus package projects in the city.

Plans are also in the works to offer citizens the opportunity to use an iPhone application to report and map potholes, graffiti, and other problems. This initiative is part of the city's new Constituent Relation Management platform.

Moving from silos to an enterprise is critical to a city such as Boston, said Oates. "This is not just a nice direction to take-this is survival, particularly in the current economic condition. We can't support silos anymore. We have to invest in enterprise. If we want to be able to deliver city services, state services, and federal services, we better get our act together and change the way we do these things, or we will not be able to deliver the core services of our organization."

Other speakers at the Senior Executive Seminar who spoke about how their organizations or governments use GIS included Sanjeev Bhagowalia, chief information officer for the U.S. Department of the Interior; Timothy Trainor, chief of the geography division of the U.S. Census Bureau; and Dr. Krishnaswamy Kasturirangan, a member of the parliament in India who was recently named to serve on the government's Planning Commission.