Protecting and Enhancing Natural Areas for Future Generations
How can a more efficient data management and reporting system help conserve wildlife habitat as well as save employees time? Sitka helped the Metro regional government find the answers.
Property acquired by Metro's Natural Areas Program
Through its Natural Areas Program, the Metro regional government has acquired more than 11,000 acres of land in the Portland metropolitan area since 1995 to protect wildlife habitat, preserve water quality and sustain the natural beauty of these areas for future generations. Administering the program requires Metro personnel to collect, analyze and report on a vast array of information concerning properties in various stages of acquisition or ongoing management.
In 2010, Metro asked Sitka Technology Group to evaluate its current information technology (IT) systems and recommend improvements that could help the Natural Areas Program more efficiently manage data, transparently convey the program’s progress and results, and streamline operations to extend local taxpayers’ investment in land conservation.
Sitka led an in-depth assessment of the program’s data sources and workflow, including how Metro employees interact with data on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. With that detailed understanding, Sitka identified potential components of a new information system tailored to Metro objectives. These added insights helped Metro develop a clearer set of criteria for evaluating its technology options.
To gauge the Natural Areas Program’s unique requirements, Sitka conducted nearly two dozen interviews with Metro personnel involved in each phase of the land acquisition and property management workflow. These discussions revealed that employees were using data that was spread across more than 35 different sources without clear definitions of which department or database was responsible for managing each one.
Land Acquisition Workflow
Metro and Sitka saw that this fragmented data model presented several challenges:
- Staff members were storing key pieces of information in multiple locations, leading to redundant and incomplete records.
- Employees struggled to locate and correlate data stored in disconnected systems, limiting Metro’s ability to assess overall program performance and streamline business processes.
- Data privacy and security measures were not uniformly and centrally enforced.
As part of examining how staff members view their specific roles and information management tasks, the Sitka team asked them to rank each task according to its importance and how often it occurs. Using their input, Sitka created a visual model that maps Natural Areas Program data sources to seven broad business entities such as acquisition, property, land management, performance measurement, reporting and security. The model also groups more than 85 user tasks into 13 functional areas associated with the business entities, giving Metro a clearer picture of which tasks are related and where the highest priorities reside.
Results of User Task Analysis for Metro
Based on this model, the project team outlined a unified technology architecture to support the Natural Areas Program’s data management and reporting objectives, accompanied by a menu of options for developing all or part of the new information system. Components of this architecture are grouped into three priority levels with cost estimates for each level. The Sitka team also built a prototype web application to demonstrate how key elements of the architecture could handle Metro’s core business processes and user tasks.
“We already knew Sitka had deep experience assisting organizations like ours that manage natural resources,” said Katy Weil, Senior Management Analyst. “But I’ve been extremely impressed with how well the Sitka experts understood our domain and how much we learned from them about our business processes as a result of this assessment.”
Metro later incorporated Sitka’s business requirements analysis, data workflow model and recommended architecture into a formal request for proposals (RFP) from which the regional government can select specific IT components and systems integration resources for the Natural Areas Program.
“We’re now in a much stronger position to choose the right technologies that will enable our staff to manage data more intelligently and spend less time searching for records in our system,” said Weil. “With the workflow improvements that Sitka has helped us identify, our people can stay focused on their core mission of protecting and enhancing lands for the public to enjoy.”
