Today’s ever-increasing responsibilities present special challenges for many local and regional governments in Central and Southeastern Europe. Due to higher expectations of the citizens, demands on revenue streams are increasing and governments must improve their efficiency and speed in providing services to citizens. Given those demands, the only way local governments can keep up with such responsibilities is by enlisting the support of more effective integrated information systems and more clearly structured, but completely collaborative business processes. Since almost all management and administration processes in a city, municipality or region touch upon land, buildings, roads, environment and many other things geographic in nature, enterprise GIS is rapidly becoming a cornerstone, or the very foundation, of modern local or regional government information systems today.

GISDATA, through its long experience of working with local governments, has developed a standardized GDi LOCALIS software product, which can scale to the size of the city. Collaborative nature of the solution, scalability and costeffectiveness are key benefits that are used by smaller and medium cities, as well as large ones.

Local governments need to provide high quality infrastructure, protection and support for their communities. In achieving this goal, local governments face numerous challenges in a fast-paced environment:

• increasing sensitivity regarding quality of public services
• new tasks being assigned to local governments
• increasing responsibility to provide money for public needs

A local government that wants to create a livable community for its citizens strives to enhance revenue collection and identify new sources of income. At the same time, public and legislative groups force restructuring and cutting expenses, which means that more work has to be done with less staff. To answer to those challenges a local government has to:

• increase productivity
• lower expenses
• gain revenue

These changes require making right decisions, based on the right information. Information becomes an asset to any government or management. Ease of information gathering, management and communication are the keys to good governance.

GISDATA effective solutions and high quality consulting services bring these keys to local governments through information and communication technologies, GIS, facilities management and other related technologies. GISDATA solutions emphasize spatial information as the common gate to the world of local government data. Through this gate, information becomes available, understandable and unified, accessible through a natural interface. GISDATA approaches the efficient management of local government on two levels; firstly, through consultancy when the GIS system is being designed, and then through the actual building and implementation of GDi LOCALIS for local and regional governments system. GISDATA solutions, both applications and databases, are scalable, meaning that they could be implemented in every city or town, regardless of its size in terms of area, population or any other variable.

Complete Service

A characteristic of the modern postindustrial economy is vast entrepreneurship diversity and the rapidity with which business has changed. This is reflected by new requirements in respect of a city’s assets management (commercial premises and buildings) currently in rent and the potential utility infrastructure earnings. Local and city governments must be effectively responsive to cope with these requirements.

Transparency emerges as a significant side effect enabling citizens to control city administration and to have access to data via the Internet. Transparency is only one of a raft of new and specific problems within urban management facing so called ‘transition countries’. The other two are decentralization of city administration towards local self-management and the privatization of public utilities. All of this is extremely complicated and sensitive to mistakes demanding a very systematic approach be taken – as is offered by GISDATA.

The first step of GISDATA’s approach is to capture the current state, real needs, abilities and inventory of existing IT infrastructure. Taking those into account an effective solution will be proposed making sure that compatibility with existing IT infrastructure will be retained, the world’s top computer applications will be implemented, and that the solution will be scalable to effectively follow any growth in requirements and interoperability that may arise, even in the interchange of data between existing geospatial database standards.

GISDATA offers a complete service from consulting and feasibility studies to database and systems design, from implementation to permanent technical support and training of users. Such an all encompassing approach coupled with a very short time for implementation guarantees success. So, over the last twelve years, quite a few cities (Pula, Rovinj, Zagreb, Koprivnica, Samobor, Opatija and Krk) have successfully used GISDATA’s Collaborative GIS.