Government and Defense – City of Canton
View as PDF
City of Canton uses Fiorano ESB™ to share information resource with its citizens
Customer Profile
The City of Canton has established itself as a viable part of the Atlanta metro area while maintaining its heritage and strong sense of community. With a population of 17,622 and an average household income of US$57,033 this heritage city clearly is preparing for the future while cherishing the past. The "best of both worlds" describes the vision that the mayor and council have for the city, as they work to balance the explosive growth and development now taking place with the values long held dear to this close-knit community
Business Problem
Their key requirements included:
- Tie some systems together loosely and others tightly.
- Error reduction (including reducing redundant data entry and manual data transfer)
- Support for industry standards
- Ability to make changes incrementally
- Business Process and Workflow Automation
- Scalability at no extra cost
- Provide On Line Information Access and services to its citizens
Driving the enterprise at the City of Canton is a heterogeneous collection of platforms, systems and applications. These include, Windows, Linux, and Unix servers, Database Servers, Mail Servers, File and Print Servers, as well as, Applications servers abound.
The City also has Department level applications for Police Records Management, Fire Records Management, Financials (General Ledger, Accounts Payable & Receivable), Cash Receipting, Utility Billing, Real Property and Personal Property Taxes, Business Licenses, Building and Planning and Zoning records Management (Inspections, Permits, etc.), and Geographic Information Systems.
Canton understands that as a local government it is a broad-based service organization. An important function of the city's IT department is to enable decision makers to make timely and informed decisions and provide service for its citizens responsibly and quickly. The only way this could be done effectively was to provide Real-Time access to accurate, complete, and up-to-date information to both the Government as well as the citizens. This required integration of heterogeneous platforms and applications.
Being able to loosely couple their key data-centric systems in a service model was a major challenge. All kinds of data that is important in its own right, was to be given a new meaning by relating to data in other systems. The other business problem was the need to spend too much time on plumbing rather than improving the business logic. Serving 17000 people with accurate information in Real-Time wasn't easy. The City of Canton needed to find ways to meet the increasing demands of its citizens for speed, service and responsiveness, all at a reduced cost. The ability to provide manageable access to all the information was needed.
Solution
The City had several disparate systems with information that demanded manual relation and coordination. Users had to know several interfaces and have security access to those separate systems. They also had to know which information they could trust. Being able to loosely couple their key data - centric systems in a service model was a major challenge.
Application Integration was seen as the key to reaching an increased productivity and data validity goal. Fiorano's Integration solution tied the systems together and enabled Real-Time change management that helped in cutting costs and significantly improving productivity.
A successful approach to the City's problems and Business Objectives involved a paradigm shift in the way the solution was approached. Fiorano ESB based on Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) technology directly matched the City of Canton's requirements with architecture based on "Brokered Peer-to-Peer" and came with a series of adapters and user friendly GUI (Graphical User Interface)tools to manage and monitor various application level service components.
Figure 1: Fiorano ESB solution at City of Canton
Due to its unique architecture, the solution implemented allows easy scalability and extensibility across the enterprise. Fiorano ESB addressed each of the technical issues at affordable cost and also provideds a higher-value for every dollar invested. The Fiorano solution empowered business Users by enabling them to create new and efficient business processes and make simple changes quickly thus saving valuable time that could be well spent on the City's business activities. Fiorano ESB provided the balance of openness and standards with that of a productive framework.
Benefits
City of Canton achieved significant qualitative and quantitative benefits by implementing the Fiorano solution:
- Increased Responsiveness: With Fiorano ESB event driven, service oriented architecture, the City was able to dynamically change workflows and business logic in Real-Time. This provides an ability to rapidly control changes based on City's objectives.
- Improved Service Credibility: The City is now able to provide online information access and utility bills and tax payments services via secured internet, hence improving its service credibility amongst citizens.
- Improved Decision Making: With all the existing IT infrastructure tied up and with access to real-time information on various applications available, the City's management was able to make better decisions involving daily activities.
- Increased Productivity: Fiorano ESB helped to minimize design, deployment, on-going management and debugging costs. Additionally, with its reusable component-centric approach to business processes, the City is able to achieve high productivity levels.
- Reduced Transaction Errors: With reduced redundant data-entry and manual data transfer, the City is able to achieve a drastic drop in the transaction errors.
- Enhanced Enterprise-Wide Security: Fiorano ESB's ACL-based, J2EE and LDAP compliant security gives the administrators a fine-grained control over the execution of all the applications and services across the network.
- Increased Revenues: With new and improved services provided online to the citizens, the City is experiencing an increase in its revenues. In addition, Fiorano's technology enabling linear build-as-you-grow scalability has achieved an incremental ROI - optimizing budget, resource and time constraints. This has resulted in a significant cost saving and enhanced profits for the City.
Why Fiorano
Fiorano ESB enabled the City to:
- Perform back-end integration easily and consistently while maximizing the use of their existing IT infrastructure.
- Exchange data and information between systems, rather than introducing delay and possible errors from having to re-enter information.
- Provide more consistent access to up-to-date information via the internet
- Achieve coupling of systems based on business activity and demand
- Easily define newer workflows and configure changes in workflow and business logic
- Extend their query and pay services (for Utility billing, property taxes and so on) online, via the internet
About Fiorano Software
Fiorano Software (www.fiorano.com) is a leading provider of enterprise class business process integration and messaging infrastructure technology. Fiorano's network-centric solutions set a new paradigm in ROI, performance, interoperability and scalability. Global leaders including Fortune 500 companies such as Boeing, British Telecom, Credit Agricole Titres, Lockheed Martin, NASA, POSCO, Qwest Communications, Schlumberger and Vodafone among others have used Fiorano technology to deploy their enterprise nervous systems.
To find out more about how Fiorano can help you meet your enterprise integration objectives, visit www.fiorano.com or Email us, we will contact you!
