The participating stakeholders numbered 26 and included board members and their invited colleagues from Utilities, Municipalities, Provincial Agencies and BC Assessment in addition to ICIS staff. Thanks to the suggestion of TELUS' Dan Shannon (ICIS Board Member and Past President), ICIS contracted TMiller & Associates and Cognitive Edge to facilitate the session.

I usually refrain from 'plugging' an organization, but Terry Miller did an exceptional job in getting all of us out of the proverbial box and achieving the desired results in one day. I will not recount the details of the day, but going through the process of 6 significant and challenging steps with cool names like  Future Backwards Modeling," "Key present-day forces," "Future scenarios," and "Randomizing SWOT," we arrived at the final step to derive certain strategic directions from the day's collected data. A multi-vote process prioritized these strategic directions.

Cut to the chase. Nine strategic directions were established, but after the multi-vote process, only four demanded our attention with the other five being inconsequential at least for the designated future.

The four top strategic directions for ICIS are:

1.    Establish data quality & completeness
2.    Engage and check-in with Members
3.    Validate Vision
4.    Establish Sustainable Funding

This wording may be a tad cryptic but for the planning session participants these words hold high meaning and relevance to the future of ICIS. As mentioned earlier, each step of the day's work produced valuable data. The aggregation and distillation of this data yielded the evidence backing the resultant directions. This evidence includes positive information about significant and specific opportunities and strengths that support each direction. There is also negative evidence addressing the impediments that are the threats and weaknesses. These directions with the supporting evidence set the stage for ICIS operations going forward. Direction alignment challenges us to recognize the opportunities, leverage the strengths, guard against the threats and eliminate the weaknesses.

Obviously, the hard result was the agreement on strategic directions. The soft result was just as meaningful to me. There was a group of individuals working together in a trusting environment to collaborate and share their thoughts to achieve a beneficial result. Sound familiar...well if you substitute geospatial data for people, then there is the ICIS vision.

As always, thank you for your ongoing support, trust, and collaboration.

 

ICIS has wasted no time getting ready for the delivery of this new application and database while the application continues to be refined by ESRI Canada in response to the first round of User Acceptance Training. Part of the preparation has included new licensing, hardware, and a hosting and security upgrade to ensure that ICIS is well placed to serve our members with a secure, robust working environment.

New licensing

The AddressBC application development project included several major license purchases.   ESRI will provide ICIS with two 'stand-alone' server licenses for the AddressBC project. A new ArcGIS Server Enterprise license will provide web services to our members and a new ArcSDE Server license will facilitate spatial database storage and access for our members. This additional licensing is a major step forward for ICIS. When fully implemented, the additional licensing will allow ICIS to establish a test and production environment that will help stabilize our system and facilitate fewer service interruptions in our production environment. 

Hardware

Hosting the AddressBC application has required ICIS to make a significant upgrade to their technical infrastructure. This upgrade has included the purchase of two new servers. A database server has been purchased to provide a robust database environment that will accommodate online editing and large data uploads from the AddressBC application. ICIS has also purchased an application server that will host the ArcGIS Server web tier and provide web services to the ICIS community. These additional servers will allow ICIS to restructure its technical environment to better support application updates, software upgrades, and service redundancy.  

Hosting

ICIS has recently relocated all of their computing services to a new facility that offers improved security for our physical computing assets. The new hosting facility provides very limited physical access to our servers and requires pre-authorization for access and hand scans for onsite visits. The hosting facility has been constructed to withstand major earthquakes and has several redundant fire protection systems.

Security

ICIS has recently purchased a Sonicwall firewall to replace the software firewall that was being used prior to the server migration to the new hosting facility. The new hardware firewall will provide greater protection for our servers with enhanced virus scanning, Anti-spam, Denial of Service (DoS), Deep Inspection Firewall, Content Filtering, Intrusion Prevention, Keylogger Protection, Java and ActiveX Blocking and, Anti-intrusion protection.

These changes to the operational capacity for ICIS will provide ongoing benefits to members as two of the primary initiatives for 2010 and 2011, AddressBC and BCSpatial, expand and develop complexity. For more information on these upgrades and the current progress of the AddressBC project, please contact Ann Archibald or Mike Wardell.