Municipal_Software_Licensing_Whitepaper_Geospatial

85 Constitution Lane, Suite 2E Danvers, MA 01923-3630 USA Tel. 978.774.1102 Fax 978.774.4841 www.sparllc.com SPAR POINT RESEARCH Population-Based Municipal Software Licensing Why Three Cities Said Yes May 15, 2006 By Bruce Jenkins, Senior Analyst Are your needs to engineer and manage municipal infrastructure and geospatial assets outstripping your ability to obtain the software you need to carry out these activities? Is the way your municipality budgets, justifies, approves and pays for this software holding back your ability to keep up with the job and deliver superior service to constituents? Spar Point studied municipalities that decided in favor of Bentley’s Municipal License Subscription program, designed to offer municipalities all the software they need for mapping and engineering of their infrastructure for a fixed annual fee based on population. We investigated what drove them to recognize the need, how they justified the decision, what payback they’re seeing, and what benefits they anticipate going forward. We found five flags that signal municipalities can benefit by changing the way they procure software for infrastructure and asset engineering and management. If any of these describe your municipality, this new approach may be right for you. 1. Software needs that outstrip budgets There’s not enough budget to afford all the software you need. You know there are applications that would help you engineer and manage your infrastructure more effectively and deliver superior service to constituents, but budget constraints put them out of reach. Maybe you can’t even afford enough seats of your current software to make your people as productive and effective as they could be. 2. Software purchasing bottlenecks New software procurements have to thread their way through annual budgeting and approval processes. Every new seat has to be laboriously applied for and justified. Even if finally approved, you know the effort of preparing justifications, and the time spent waiting, exact costs from you, your government and your constituents. 3. License administration headaches Administering license pools is a laborintensive but low-value-add activity – especially when too many users are fighting over too few licenses. 4. Data silos You may have a mix of legacy tools from various providers that don’t play well together. Data has to be manually re-entered from one application to the next. The same data is duplicated in many different places. Sometimes it’s unclear which version is DISCLAIMER: Research for this publication was funded by Bentley Systems, Incorporated. The information in this publication is based on the most reliable data obtainable by Spar Point at the time of publication. However, the information is furnished on the express understanding that unless otherwise indicated, it has not been independently verified and may contain material errors. Readers are cautioned not to rely on the information in forming judgments about a company or its products, or in making purchase decisions. The information is not intended for use in the investor market, defined as an individual/entity whose principal use of the information is for the purpose of making investment decisions in the securities of companies covered directly or indirectly by the information. In the event of error, Spar Point’s sole responsibility shall be to correct such error in succeeding editions of this publication. Before using the information please contact Spar Point to ensure it is the most recent version. Municipal Software Licensing 060515 1 of 10 © 2006 Spar Point Research LLC Reproduction prohibited. All rights reserved. Population-Based Municipal Software Licensing Why Three Cities Said Yes May 15, 2006 85 Constitution Lane, Suite 2E Danvers, MA 01923-3630 US A Tel. 978.774.1102 Fax 978.774.4841 www.sparllc.com SPAR POINT RESEARCH the most current, or which is the data of record. All this is exacting costs in time, labor and error – you suspect that if you could find a cost-effective way to begin migrating to a better integrated, more interoperable set of solutions, you could start to get a handle on these inefficiencies. 5. Constraints on delivering services to constituents Taken together, all of these software-related constraints are limiting the quality and quantity of services you can offer to constituents. Lessons from lighthouse adopters Here are the stories of municipalities we studied: Why Bentley? Why the Municipal License Subscription program? Was it hard to justify? What’s been the payback? In sum, customers reported the MLS program is easy to justify on the basis of direct software cost savings alone. We also heard that license administration labor can be reduced by 50% or more. Looking ahead, a major benefit customers foresee is the ability to gain efficiencies by easily being able to try out and adopt Bentley software applications in disciplines where they were not used before. CITY OF EDMONTON ALBERTA, CANADA Population: 700,000 Need The City of Edmonton in Alberta, Canada has been using Bentley software since MicroStation was first introduced two decades ago. But due to budget constraints, it was still using MicroStation V7, and had yet to adopt other Bentley applications that it believed would benefit it. Further, it was hitting usage limits on its existing Bentley software – users could not always access the software they needed, when they needed it. Justification What prompted the decision to move to MLS? “It was, more than anything else, financial,” according to Phil Thompson, General Supervisor for Mapping and Records in the Drainage Services and Drainage Planning Branch of the city’s Asset Management and Public Works Department. Under MLS, direct software costs for current tools at current usage levels “are cheaper for the first year. By the third year it works out to about the same as Select with the software we’re using now – but we get right to use a lot more software than we’re using now, without paying more.” What was the approval process? Edmonton’s Bentley account representative, Thompson recounts, “engaged first with me and with Pat Gurney,” methods analyst in the IT Branch of the city’s Corporate Services department. “From the IT side, Pat handles the city’s account with Bentley. She put together a group drawn from the design/drafting groups in each of the city’s departments and branches, to sit down and look at it. Then she brought in the Materials Management department, and they did the contracting with Bentley.” “The MLS decision was made on our recommendation, along with the IT Branch,” reports Thompson. “Then the IT Branch and the Materials Management department, which handles contracts and agreements, made the ultimate decision.” Municipal Software Licensing 060515 2 of 10 © 2006 Spar Point Research LLC Reproduction prohibited. All rights reserved. Population-Based Municipal Software Licensing Why Three Cities Said Yes May 15, 2006 85 Constitution Lane, Suite 2E Danvers, MA 01923-3630 US A Tel. 978.774.1102 Fax 978.774.4841 www.sparllc.com SPAR POINT RESEARCH What kicked off the process of evaluating MLS? “Our Bentley account manager showing up and showing us the number,” says Mike Weissenborn, systems analyst in the city’s Corporate Services department. “We went through the numbers, and it was a definite savings.” Before MLS, Edmonton purchased Bentley software through the Bentley Select program. Under Select, the city’s total annual budget for infrastructure design, construction and maintenance software was approximately CDN$200,000, according to Weissenborn. Under MLS, that will drop to “about CDN$160,000 this year – with our tiered implementation, that’s a direct cost savings of about CDN$60,000 over the first three years. Afterwards it will be very close to what we were paying before, but we can have more products and users for the same cost.” Compelled by these savings, Weissenborn reports, “Everybody said, ‘Let’s go for it.’” Was there resistance from decision-makers? “There was no resistance to MLS in the justification process,” reports Pat Gurney, methods analyst in the city’s IT Branch, which manages the city’s computer hardware and software purchasing. “The question was, ‘Will it cost us less money than at present?’ The answer was clearly yes, so that was the kickoff.” What about resistance from users? According to Gurney, this question took the form: “With MLS, can we still do what we’re doing today? The answer again was yes – and more, since MLS will let us have more software than before.” Thompson and Weissenborn agreed with Gurney that “there was no resistance at all.” Payback In addition to direct cost savings, what other gains does Edmonton foresee due to MLS? Upgrading to the newest release of key products is one of the biggest, according to Weissenborn, followed closely by being able to adopt new applications not previously used. “Bentley representatives went through all the software that would be available to us under MLS,” he reports. “There have been a lot of new Bentley products released that we haven’t had time to look at.” Specifically, “over the last five years, usage has basically stayed the same. We haven’t gone to a lot of new products; we have sort of fallen behind because we are not yet on MicroStation V8 – this has woken us up to that.” Will MLS make the procurement decision and justification process easier? “Sure – now users can just go and get what they need,” says Weissenborn. “I expect to see a lot more casual users. And people who have anything to do with CAD – if they can have it on their desktops, now they will probably take it. MLS will eliminate our having to have shared machines; in a few areas, we had set up shared machines so users wouldn’t have to fight over licenses.” Thompson offers an example. “In my branch we have 40 MicroStation licenses and 65 GeoOutlook licenses – that’s an old Bentley product mainly used by our field staff as a file viewer. MLS will help us get off that to, probably, MicroStation in the field, because of the unlimited seat access under MLS. And from an IT perspective, that’s better because of only having to manage one product instead of several.” Easier software administration is another major benefit. “We won’t have to worry about doing license management,” says Weissenborn. “If someone gets a new PC, we won’t have to worry about ordering new licenses. Or if we need 30 licenses one year, then 50 licenses the next year, we just won’t have to worry about the licensing. Under MLS we receive one license file that includes a license for every application. Before, we had to manage 23 different license pools. And we had to install new node-locked licenses on each different PC – it was a lot of work to maintain all that.” How significant is the savings in license administration labor? “It will save 30 to 40 hours each year, out of a total of 60 hours previously – a 50% reduction or more.” Municipal Software Licensing 060515 3 of 10 © 2006 Spar Point Research LLC Reproduction prohibited. All rights reserved. Population-Based Municipal Software Licensing Why Three Cities Said Yes May 15, 2006 85 Constitution Lane, Suite 2E Danvers, MA 01923-3630 US A Tel. 978.774.1102 Fax 978.774.4841 www.sparllc.com SPAR POINT RESEARCH More essentially, now everyone has the tools they need to do their work. Thompson notes, “We were hitting our usage time limits on MicroStation under Select, even though we were using the licenses as a pool. Some people were not able to get access because all the licenses were checked out. MLS will alleviate that.” Looking ahead Easier ability to upgrade to new software versions should be a boon for data sharing and interoperability. “A lot of our consultants use AutoCAD,” Thompson explains. “That’s one of the driving reasons we want to move to MicroStation V8 – so we can share AutoCAD data and also PDF data more easily with our consultants.” “We do a fair bit of data sharing,” Weissenborn adds, but not yet being on MicroStation V8 impedes that. “Being under MLS will make it easier to move to V8, because we will actually drop a few products – we will drop GeoOutlook and will probably drop PowerDraft, because we can all go to MicroStation now. There will be a lot more IPLOT out there, so there will be consistency throughout the departments in what software is used. And as we upgrade to V8, they won’t need additional tool like Acrobat as it’s all built in to V8. MLS will make it easier for us to stay up to date.” Finally, a major benefit lies in piloting new software and getting new projects up and running. “MLS will make that easier,” Thompson says, “because the software is already available and you don’t have to justify it. Being able to go out and get a piece of software and try it, benchmark it to see if it works” – Thompson expects this will encourage users to “look at all the applications that might give us efficiencies. The InRoads tools and some others are things we had stayed away from because of their cost – now that’s been taken away.” CITY OF KOTKA FINLAND Population: 55,500 Need Kotka, a port city in southeast Finland, has used Bentley’s MicroStation, I/RAS B and IPLOT since 1992, together with early versions of Stella, a local product for municipal land use management and cadastral mapping (Bentley Land Management is an internationalized version of this product). Kari Tikkanen, City Surveyor in the city’s Land Use Department, reports this software was the first CAD environment adopted by the city. The city’s annual infrastructure software budget is approximately €100,000. Of that, about €50,000 goes to Bentley, and the rest to local software vendors such as WM Data, which provides a GIS application used for municipal building permitting and land parcel management. Over the past five years, Tikkanen reports this budget has increased about 5% per year – “we have bought new software licenses, and inflation has also taken its toll.” Going forward, he says, “We hope it will increase more slowly because of this new Municipal License Subscription program.” Justification What prompted the decision to move to MLS? “Steady costs no matter how many licenses we have,” says Tikkanen. “Under Select, the costs were rising. And we could not get enough licenses because of budget limits.” Was the decision process difficult? “I made the decision in a few days, after consulting our ICT [Information and Communications Technology] personnel,” according to Tikkanen. ICT is a Municipal Software Licensing 060515 4 of 10 © 2006 Spar Point Research LLC Reproduction prohibited. All rights reserved. Population-Based Municipal Software Licensing Why Three Cities Said Yes May 15, 2006 85 Constitution Lane, Suite 2E Danvers, MA 01923-3630 US A Tel. 978.774.1102 Fax 978.774.4841 www.sparllc.com SPAR POINT RESEARCH software support group within the Land Use Department. What was their input? “I shared our information with them, and they agreed based on software cost savings,” Tikkanen explains. “They understand the need of users, and know what kinds of software users need, because the ICT department upgrades our hardware and software.” For example, under Select, the group could clearly see that “we did not have enough MicroStation seats, so we had to use GeoOutlook – just the viewing and redlining software.” How was it funded? “We split the costs by the number of installed software seats in each department,” Tikkanen explains. “I am in Technical Affairs; we have also a Health Care Department, and the ICT Office. Mainly the licenses are in the Technical Affairs Department.” “The Municipal License Subscription program sells itself,” Tikkanen sums up. The software cost savings “are the best recommendation.” Payback What’s been the payback so far? “We have already saved approximately €50,000 by putting in about 30 new MicroStation seats so far,” Tikkanen reports. “We expect to add 10 or 15 more seats by the end of this year. And we installed one more IPLOT server; now we have two in all – that’s a great savings also.” Under Bentley Select, an IPLOT server license is priced between €5000 and €10,000 each; under MLS, the number available is, in principle, unlimited. In all, “now we have about 67 seats of MicroStation – double the number we had last year.” Usage of other key applications has also gone up – the city is using 45 seats of Stella, 24 seats of PowerMap, 37 seats of I/RAS B and two IPLOT servers. Kotka also uses five seats of TerraSolid for infrastructure design. Under MLS, the city expects its MicroStation installed base will soon rise to 80 to 90 seats in all. The city’s real software expenditure “will stay about the same,” Tikkanen says, but based on “the number of new users, we have saved about €50,000 already.” Has the move to MLS made the software procurement decision/justification process easier? Yes, says Tikkanen. “No justification is needed now, after we adopted MLS” – a big change. “Before, the process of justifying new software was very slow,” he explains. “If I wanted to buy software next year, I had to put it into the budget this October. It would be approved in November, and it would take about one year before I would get the software. Now, I can get the software I need right away.” Another way that MLS makes procurement “much easier” – software obtained under MLS can be funded from the city’s operating budget rather than its capital budget. “It is hard to get investment funds for software, but I can get consulting funded easily,” Tikkanen explains. “If I buy new licenses, it comes from the new-product purchase budget, but MLS comes from the maintenance budget. The old way was [to buy software] from the capital budget. Now, MLS comes from the consulting budget – part of the operating budget, which we can get more freely.” Is it reducing license administration costs or labor? “Perhaps not reducing, but helping a lot,” he says. “There is more need for support because of the new users, but it is easier to support because of [their all being on] the same platform.” On the other hand, he adds, “software support is easier” because “everybody is using the same software.” Looking ahead Kotka expects MLS will also help it get new software projects up and running more quickly than before. In particular, Tikkanen reports, “we are looking forward to seeing what ProjectWise can do for us.” An important seaport, “our harbor is the second largest in Finland,” he Municipal Software Licensing 060515 5 of 10 © 2006 Spar Point Research LLC Reproduction prohibited. All rights reserved. Population-Based Municipal Software Licensing Why Three Cities Said Yes May 15, 2006 85 Constitution Lane, Suite 2E Danvers, MA 01923-3630 US A Tel. 978.774.1102 Fax 978.774.4841 www.sparllc.com SPAR POINT RESEARCH notes. “We build new docks all the time. We have many operators working there, and we must keep track of every detail – models, drawings, contracts. I think ProjectWise is the right software for that.” In fact, he says, “We expect 10 companies will use ProjectWise on an upcoming port project.” CITY OF MIDDELBURG ZEELAND, THE NETHERLANDS Population: 46,500 Need Middelburg, the capital of Zeeland province in the Netherlands, has been a MicroStation user since V3.3 in the late 1980s. Going forward, the city faces the challenge of complying with the evolving requirements of the country’s National Spatial Strategy, a long-term policy for managing and coordinating development and land use. “The national government is calling on municipalities for more accuracy and more detailed databases,” explains John Polderman, civil engineer in the city’s Civil Engineering Department. “In coming years, every city will have to register information with the national government – buildings, addresses, land parcels and the like – so that government organizations at all levels can exchange data about these assets.” The ultimate goal, he says, is “just one database across the whole country.” Justification The government is driving toward this standardization “by defining the data model (not by specifying the brand of software),” he reports. “For example, they define how you describe a building – what must be in the database. For that reason we’ve started working with Oracle Spatial Database, to have geographic and other kinds of data in a single database.” To advance this effort, “we are anxious to begin working with Bentley software that can manage Oracle spatial data.” For example, Bentley PowerMap, which the city currently uses, “can read the Oracle spatial database (although we don’t have it configured to do that yet). Overall, that’s why we decided in favor of MLS – to look for the software we need to comply with this initiative, for example ProjectWise, MicroStation GeoGraphics and others.” What prompted the city to consider MLS? “Bentley came to us with the suggestion,” Polderman says. “We saw that the annual costs under our existing Bentley Select service were close to those under MLS,” and that MLS would let the city upgrade and expand the tools it uses without swelling the budget. How was the decision justified? “The reason to change to MLS was to get better control over our software budget,” he explains. Before, whenever there was a need to upgrade to newer or more capable software, “it was an annual struggle for the budget. Now, with a fixed fee, we won’t have to struggle any more.” And while the city government is more or less “used to an increasing software budget, now we can use that increase more productively – to train users, for example. Our training budget is always under pressure.” Was the approval process difficult? “Bentley made the case to me, then I took the case to my manager,” the head of the city’s Civil Engineering Department. The decision process “did not have to go any further – our department has its own budget, so we were able to make our own decision.” Was there resistance from either decision-makers or users? “There was no resistance from anywhere,” Polderman says. “Everyone saw the advantages at once.” Municipal Software Licensing 060515 6 of 10 © 2006 Spar Point Research LLC Reproduction prohibited. All rights reserved. Population-Based Municipal Software Licensing Why Three Cities Said Yes May 15, 2006 85 Constitution Lane, Suite 2E Danvers, MA 01923-3630 US A Tel. 978.774.1102 Fax 978.774.4841 www.sparllc.com SPAR POINT RESEARCH Payback Middelburg’s annual budget for infrastructure and geospatial engineering software is currently €40,000. Of that, €35,000 goes to Bentley, and the remainder to other vendors. At present the city uses 18 seats of MicroStation and 16 seats of Bentley PowerMap. It also uses FlexiWEB, an online content management system developed by ISIS Benelux BV (now part of Bentley Benelux) used to distribute data through the city’s intranet, and RoPlan, a local application for planning, zoning and land parcel management. All this software is managed and administered by the Civil Engineering Department, for both its own users and those in other departments. Will MLS make the procurement decision and justification process easier? “Yes,” says Polderman. Under MLS, “it will be much easier to implement new technology.” In particular, an important payback will be the ability to upgrade from PowerMap to GeoGraphics in order to more readily meet National Spatial Strategy requirements. While the 2D orientation of PowerMap is sufficient for now, it is likely the national program will drive the city “to use 3D modeling in future on new developments,” which will require migration to GeoGraphics. “Besides land management, we also have a building management department that may need to manage their data in 3D in future.” PowerMap is substantially less costly than MicroStation-based GeoGraphics, Polderman notes. Under its previous Select program, upgrading its 16 PowerMap seats to GeoGraphics would have meant a total of “about €2000 per seat that we would have had to expend before. We don’t yet know if it’s necessary to change every one of those licenses, but now we are free to consider it.” Looking ahead A major benefit going forward will be the ease of investigating and adopting Bentley tools in additional disciplines. For Middelburg, this is the real payback from MLS – “I don’t think the number of people working with the software will increase,” but the city is now in a position to adopt additional Bentley tools. “Our ability to try out new Bentley tools will be much easier,” Polderman concludes. “That is one of the big advantages – now we have one municipal license, so we can just download the software and go for it.” BOROUGH OF OLDHAM LANCASHIRE, UK Population: 217,000 A long-term advantage anticipated by some early MLS adopters is the ability to more easily implement Bentley applications in disciplines where they were not used before. An important consequence of this should be the evolution of integrated software environments that enable and promote data sharing and interoperation. As the MLS program is too new to test this hypothesis directly, we supplemented our research by studying a municipality that has worked to achieve this goal using Bentley tools under previously available licensing programs. Need In 1994 the Oldham Metropolitan Borough Council (OMBC) took action that would eventually transform its traditional paper-based processes for infrastructure and geospatial asset management to a digital technology base. Peter Taylor, CAD and GIS Development Officer within ICT (Information and Computer Technologies), the borough’s IT, networking and communications department, explains how it began. “We had a section called Property Asset Management – the group that manages publicly owned land and buildings in Oldham. They managed information about leases, land value and so on. Every time they bought or sold land, it was recorded on paper maps – about 600 of them. They used a colored pencil to color in the region of land that Municipal Software Licensing 060515 7 of 10 © 2006 Spar Point Research LLC Reproduction prohibited. All rights reserved. Population-Based Municipal Software Licensing Why Three Cities Said Yes May 15, 2006 85 Constitution Lane, Suite 2E Danvers, MA 01923-3630 US A Tel. 978.774.1102 Fax 978.774.4841 www.sparllc.com SPAR POINT RESEARCH had been bought or sold. The person in charge of property services in the early 1990s wanted to move away from the microfiche and card index systems used to archive this information.” The Property Asset Management group decided to computerize this process. “That was when I was brought in from outside, to help them select the right system,” Taylor continues. “We wanted to link the graphics system to databases. And we wanted not just to link flat 2D maps to data, but to be able to take architectural floor plans and 3D models, and place those models on our land parcels – we wanted walkthroughs and fly-throughs that would let people visualize what the properties would look like if they were built on a given site. We didn’t want just a mapping system, nor just an AEC system.” After six months investigating and testing products, the group chose MicroStation. But it went further. “We were looking not only at the graphics side, but also at property management systems,” Taylor recounts. “We wanted a property management system to match to the graphics system, but could not find anything, so we wrote our own in-house. We scanned in our maps, brought them to real-world size using Bentley’s raster management tool, then once we got the digitized map into the system, we linked it back to the equipment database.” That department was then merged into another department that included highway engineers and some electrical engineers – “they were literally drawing on boards,” Taylor says. “Since that was working for them, we rolled out our solution first to the highway engineers, because they already used MOSS and were accustomed to automated tools. So it first went to the architects and the highway engineers, then other departments started looking at what the Property Management Department was doing, and started buying in.” The next step came when “the head of ICT and the key person from Property Services decided to centralize the management of all this activity, and bring everyone together,” says Taylor. “There were still lots of diverse databases all over – even though people were all using the same products, there was no central pool of data. Everyone kept their data on their own desktops or servers. So to begin, we put servers in place that would let every department pool its data in a central source. Next we put in place the ability for anyone in any department to see what data exists in every place – you might not have had permission to access it, but you could see it was there. What set this off was a presentation by a Bentley executive who used the phrase ‘Create Once, Manage Well, Publish Many.’ That was exactly what we wanted to do – before that, it was ‘Create Many, Manage Poorly, Publish If You Can.’” “So we completed the master data set for each discipline. The AEC and Highway departments were easy – each of them had only one version of its dataset. But every geospatial user had his own dataset, with lots of duplication. It wasn’t just silos – they didn’t even know other people existed outside their silo. People were recreating information that might have already been created two years ago. So we said to people, ‘Do you know your partner next door already has this information – why don’t you use it?’ We brought all their information together into one big geospatial project data set.” Justification What was the decision process? “Getting to our 1994 strategy decision initially was no problem at all,” Taylor explains. “Because it began quite small, in just one department, it had no impact across other departments, so nobody could object to what someone else was doing. Then the strategy began to be accepted and developed into other departments.” How was the change justified? “We put together a package and presented it to senior management,” says Taylor. “Everyone could see there would be big benefit in this centralizing. Municipal Software Licensing 060515 8 of 10 © 2006 Spar Point Research LLC Reproduction prohibited. All rights reserved. Population-Based Municipal Software Licensing Why Three Cities Said Yes May 15, 2006 85 Constitution Lane, Suite 2E Danvers, MA 01923-3630 US A Tel. 978.774.1102 Fax 978.774.4841 www.sparllc.com SPAR POINT RESEARCH The desire to drive through ‘e-government,’ to share information within government and with constituents – that started everyone thinking about how to do this. ‘E-government’ is a national initiative passed three or four years ago, but in truth we had already adopted the idea six or seven years ago.” From the initial purchase of three MicroStation licenses in 1994, OMBC now uses 238 licensed Bentley products including MicroStation, Architecture, Rebar, PowerDraft, Redline, View, MXURBAN, MXRENEW, MXROAD, SELECT Server, Descartes, Geo Web Publisher, GWS (FlexiMap), I/RAS B, PowerMap, MicroStation GeoGraphics, GIDE, Retwall, Enterprise Training Subscription, OS MasterMap & NTF Translators, Geo Web Publisher plot to scale, GWS watermark and copyright, Google Earth Tools, Bentley Select, plus various consultancy, integration and implementation services. Taylor reports the borough’s annual fee under Bentley Select is currently £55,000. Payback Can the gains be quantified? This is a challenge, as no records were kept of individual savings brought by the new strategy. On the other hand, the borough reports winning substantial funding from the national government – notably a £14.5 million award to improve local infrastructure, particularly retaining walls, plus another, more recent £2.6 million sum – because its IT infrastructure helped it make a compelling case that the work was needed. Taylor gives an example of the integrated workflow all this has enabled: The need for an additional school was identified, and the process to have it built was launched. The borough’s land and property section uses its geospatial application to identify a suitable location and investigate land ownership; its findings are recorded geospatially. This information is then used by the borough’s surveying sections as the basis for the land survey. They produce a series of files that include geospatial maps, terrain models and AEC files, which in turn give the architects information needed to generate AEC construction details. The borough’s mechanical and electrical section picks up this data and details the building services. Meanwhile the highway consultancy section uses all this data to engineer and contract for the necessary road network. The land and property sections can then update their geospatial records by assigning the new school an entry in the local land and property gazetteer. Afterward, the education sections use much of this data to manage and support their services including building management, pupil allocation and care. Looking ahead In all, says Taylor, the borough continues to drive forward the integration of AEC and geospatial data and workflows into a single corporate entity, regardless of discipline. All services now create a single instance of information, then share it across the authority to all data authors or viewers. Having this single instance of data has eliminated duplication and associated data capture costs, provided a reliable, definitive data set and an improved method of data delivery, reduced management costs, and improved service delivery to constituents. The result is an integrated city enabled through desktop solutions, plus a live and active public web site. What about Bentley’s new Municipal License Subscription? While the borough in principle finds the benefits attractive, introduction of MLS is currently under review, pending future ICT strategy decisions. Municipal Software Licensing 060515 9 of 10 © 2006 Spar Point Research LLC Reproduction prohibited. All rights reserved. Population-Based Municipal Software Licensing Why Three Cities Said Yes May 15, 2006 85 Constitution Lane, Suite 2E Danvers, MA 01923-3630 US A Tel. 978.774.1102 Fax 978.774.4841 www.sparllc.com SPAR POINT RESEARCH What should you expect from MLS? What can population-based software licensing do for your municipality? As the lessons of these cities show, the value of MLS is how it can help you: 1. Afford all the software you need Save money on current software installation and usage levels. Stop bumping up against usage limits – get access to as many seats as you need, without busting the budget. Upgrade to new products and major new revisions that were previously out of reach. 2. Add software without preparing justifications and waiting out the budget cycle Add the new seats and new applications you need, when you need them. Try out new Bentley applications without the headache of obtaining and installing trial licenses. Implement on demand. 3. Streamline license administration Cut software administration labor by half or more. Shed the burden of managing multiple license pools. Eliminate the chore of ordering new licenses when adding seats and users. 4. Bridge islands of automation. Unify data silos Upgrade to current versions of Bentley applications designed to coexist and communicate with other software. Easily try out Bentley tools in disciplines where they were not previously used, to gauge the value of interoperable, data-compatible applications in saving time, labor and error, and improving the quality and quantity of work product. 5. Improve service delivery to constituents Give your people access to the tools they need to be as efficient and productive as possible in delivering services to constituents. Municipal Software Licensing 060515 10 of 10 © 2006 Spar Point Research LLC Reproduction prohibited. All rights reserved.