The City's e-services department has been recognised for outstanding contributions to the corporate geographic information systems industry, with a Special Achievement Award from the ESRI.

Marcelle Hattingh, the director of corporate geo-informatics with Jack Dangermond, President of ESRId and Chris Wray, Deputy Director of System Admin and Development in the City

JOBURG'S e-services again has been recognised by the international technology community.

The City's corporate geo-informatics directorate, or Corporate GIS (CGIS), recently won its second Special Achievement in GIS award at the ESRI's Annual User Conference held in San Diego, in the United States.

It received the award for outstanding contributions to the global society and for setting new precedents throughout the GIS community by the manner in which they used GIS technology to provide solutions.

"The SAG awards celebrate the achievement and vision of innovators in the GIS field," says Jack Dangermond, ESRI president. "Each winner brings benefits to their communities and influences others to do the same."

Explaining what the directorate does, Chris Wray, the deputy director of systems administration and development, said: "We promote the use of GIS as an enterprise solution within the City. Different departments used to maintain their [own] databases, but with the expansion of GIS to all departments we now provide data for all City departments … GIS is the core of the City's data."

CGIS acquires information from various sources, which it stores. A range of City departments has access to this information. For example, the registrar of deeds is the original source of property information for CGIS. After collecting the property information, it generates a standard property identifier and stores the information on a database for purposes such as billing, valuations, planning and service provision.

This is not the first time CGIS has been recognised. It received an award in 2002 for its Unicity intranet website.

In 2002, Johannesburg was nominated for the development of the SA Explorer CD-ROM and Online mapping, which was useful for the post-apartheid demarcation of municipal borders. The creation of the new borders also meant that there was a need to develop maps and other ways of communicating the changes to citizens, which GIS managed.

Joburg has been an ESRI client for more than a decade, during which time it has developed a true Enterprise GIS system spanning numerous municipal departments. With the introduction of its geodatabase, a geographic information system with common data access, and a management framework that can be deployed wherever it is needed, the City is also able to serve non-municipal organisations.

The development of the Land Information System (LIS) provides access to corporate data and feeds property information into the City's SAP system, which in turn is used for billing and customer relationship management.

CGIS beat more than 150 000 user sites from across the world, including American organisations, to win this year's ESRI award.

Other winners included the Consortium Catalogue Services Project, a project of the Australian state and local government, and Province Antwerpen of the state and local government of Belgium. Other winners hailed from industries like mining and education.

"Johannesburg's vision is to become a world class African city," said Marcelle Hattingh, the director of corporate geo-informatics.

"It thus needs to meet world best practices in terms of processes, systems and people and to transform the service levels and service delivery model of property services. Property services need to be integrated into one property value chain that cuts across departments. Driven by this dedication, the City's GIS provided an innovative governance solution that saw Johannesburg nominated for yet another Special Achievement Award."

ESRI is a world leader in GIS software and solutions with more than a million people around the world using its GIS products on a daily basis. Every year ESRI's Special Achievement in GIS award honours organisations that have embraced GIS technology to serve the world better.