Washington State Department of Ecology : Information Management Washington State Department of Ecology : Information Management
The Washington Department of Ecology (Ecology) depends on a solid foundation of high quality, timely, and accessible information to support the full range of its business functions. Business functions include the day-to-day activities which Ecology performs in carrying out its mandates -- its business. Ecology's long-term information technology goal is to provide agency management, agency staff, and interested stakeholders with timely and direct access to the information they need to answer the questions they face daily.
In June 1995, Ecology completed an Information Strategy Plan (ISP) which laid out projects required to achieve its information integration and access vision. This document contains the deliverables from the first of these projects: a Business Area Analysis (BAA) conducted to identify and define the activities common to the agency for identifying facility/sites. The ISP prescribed Facility/Site Identification as the first project because it represents the foundation of the agency's business and because it is a critical building block for providing integrated data access across Ecology's different program areas.
Business Area Analysis is the second stage (ISP is the first) of an information systems development approach called the Information Engineering Methodology. The objective of a BAA project is to identify and analyze the activities and information requirements associated with an organization's individual business areas (e.g., permitting) that have been identified during ISP. The stage which follows BAA, Business System Design (BSD), is intended to take this logical view of Ecology's business requirements and design the information system(s) that will support them. This split between logical analysis (BAA) and physical design (BSD) has the benefit of avoiding past practices which may influence new systems development. The results, therefore, of a BAA project is a 'pure' view of Ecology's business requirements. This view is not a formal model for future information systems; the model is derived from the requirements.
The core results of the Facility/Sites Identification BAA Project consists of two logical models: one that evaluates the interrelationships of Ecology's activities (an activity model); and the second which relates to the ways Ecology handles the data (a data model).
The Activity Model represents the business functions and processes that allow the agency to manage and analyze facility/site related information.
For example :
The analysis of the current information systems across the agency determined that there are 18 systems in existence which manage information within the scope of the facility/site identification business area. A significant amount of the information is duplicated across the systems, and, although the nature of the information is similar, the formats used to store the data are far from standard. This has severely limited the agency's ability to share data across different Ecology programs.
The Data Model represents the information needs and business rules which support the identification of facility/sites. There are three main components to this model: facility/site; geographic location; and party.
A facility/site is defined as an operation with which Ecology interacts because of its effects upon the environment. Analysis conducted during the BAA indicated that, where one program may view a facility/site as a whole, another program may view it as two or more individual facility/sites. Analysis also indicated that the name, location, size, industry, and affiliated parties are important details to be retained in association with any given facility/site. Facility/sites are often common across programs, although currently they are not shared.
A geographic location is defined as a physical location of interest to Ecology because it contains either an active or potential source of pollution, or a sensitive natural resource which Ecology monitors or is responsible for protecting. A geographic location can be a point or a boundary, and there is sometimes a requirement to monitor its changes over time. Ecology programs have a number of ways in which they identify a geographic location. There is no consistent approach used across the agency for the data it collects. Ecology staff participating in the project indicated that geographic location is critical information for the identification of facility/sites from both the perspectives of physically accessing the facility/site, as well as supporting geographic-based data analyses.
A party is defined as an individual or external organization which is of interest to the agency (e.g., a company applying for a permit, a contact person at a facility/site, a facility/site's owner). The specific types of information associated with the party can include a mailing address and/or phone number. As well, there is a fairly common set of affiliation types which a party can have with a facility/site (e.g., owner, operator, site contact, fee contact). Ecology staff indicated that party information is fairly common across programs.
Having defined the business requirements for facility/site identification, the next step toward the goal of implementing an agency-wide information system of facility/sites is to design the computer and manual systems required to support those requirements. To accomplish these tasks, a Business System Design (BSD) project has been defined for this business area. The BSD will result in:
A construction project that will build the specified information system and interface with one or more of Ecology's existing information systems will then follow. Subsequent projects will fully implement the process re-engineering for data collection and management, and connect existing systems to the new agency-wide facility/site information system.
For more information, contact:
Lynn Singleton, Information Integration Project Manager
Department of Ecology
PO BOX 47600
Olympia WA 98504-7600
Telephone: (360) 407-6610
E-Mail: lsin461@ecy.wa.gov