Neighbourhood Intelligence Meeting with ESRI UK

Venue: Manchester City Council

Date: Tuesday 6th September 10.30am

Attendance:

RL – Robin Lawler / Chief Executive, Northwards Housing
TR –Tim Robinson / Senior Performance, Research and Intelligence Officer MCC
AL – Alan Leicester / Group head of Communities One Manchester Housing Group
TB – Tom Bassford / Business Intelligence, Performance and Improvement Manager One Manchester Housing Group
PR – Paul Roberts / Assistant Director of Resources, Wythenshawe Community Housing Group
RY – Rashid Yaman / IT Analyst, Arawack Housing Group
TM - Tom Mellor / Account Manager, Esri UK
RA – Robin Appleby / Esri UK
GN – Gillespie Ndlovu / Partnership Officer, MHPP
JS – Jordane Smith / Partnership Officer, MHPP

Minutes

RL welcomed attendees and all introduced themselves.

TM introduced himself and ESRI UK before giving a presentation on ArcGIS and how it could meet the Partnership’s brief on GIS.

Robin Appleby continued the presentation and demonstrated the uses and functions of ArcGIS.

RL thanked ESRI UK on their presentation and demonstration before tabling the questions put together by the Partnership as follows:

Q1. Please confirm that the Level 1 Subscription cost for ArcGIS online is £2,060 per annum per organisation regardless of whether all 18 housing providers sign up to the scheme.

A1. Yes. The £2,060 P/A is per organisation and regardless of whether all partners take up the offer.

Q2. Some members of the partnership are active in other regions of the UK outside Manchester. Would the ArcGISOnline licence enable them to upload their own spatial data and access map bases for other areas of the UK?

A2. Yes. The maps, data and functions are available globally and those who take up the offer can use all available resources.

Q3. Is there a minimum term for the contract with each partner/ the partnership?

A3. Subscriptions last for a year and members would not be bound to renewing their subscription after said time.

Q4. Our understanding is that with the pricing structure offered, each partner organisation would hold a separate account with ESRI UK to use the ArcOnline product in any way they wish - and within our partnership we would organise a shared 'group' for the data sharing - which could be accessed by partners granted access to that group - provided they had an active licence - could you confirm this is correct.

A4. Yes. In addition, partners who currently have ArcGIS will not need new or different subscriptions.

Q5. The proposal assumes that the initial set up and support for uploading data, reference layers would be undertaken by MCCs in-house GIS team - to help the partnership evaluate this approach can you estimate the cost of ESRI undertaking this work - or facilitating one of the other partner organisations to do it.

A5. An estimate cannot be offered without a better understanding of the data each member has available and would like to upload. A quote can be provided for this, but further discussions would be required.

TR – MCC may be able to facilitate uploading the data but this would depend on the progress of related work streams and available capacity. Further discussions between TR and TM required.

Q6. The partnership would like to develop a better understanding of the 'Credits' system.

Q6a. Credits are charged for data storage. If the partnership has a shared data set - for example a compiled list of their combined housing stock how would the cost of storage be apportioned across the partnership. Similarly if the MCC in-house GIS team uploaded some of the common reference layers such as Wards or Output areas how would the cost of storage be apportioned - or would MCC effectively be using up credits on behalf of the partnership.

A6a. Credits are used to cover data storage costs and in addition to the 2500 credits available on level 1 subscription (£2,060) members can purchase additional credits at £85 for 1000. Other housing subscribers have not used up the credits in their level 1 subscription and ESRI have only had 2 customers require more credits for storage. A credit budgeting system is available to manage usage. MCC have a GIS sever from which shared data could be uploaded & stored. This would reduce use of credits but is dependant on capacity and other work streams as mentioned above.

Q6b. Section 5.3 of the proposal indicates that ESRI UKwould be happy to help estimate annual credit usage for each partner above the initial allocation- it would be helpful to get an outline of what the credit usage might equate to for each partner - perhaps from previous case studies

A6b. Going over the allocated credits would depend on how ArcGIS Online is used by each subscriber, thus further discussions would be required to understand this. As an example, Your housing are ArcGIS Online subscribers and have not gone over their level 1 allocation of 2500 since they signed up over a year ago.

Q7. Does the initial setup / work package include training on how to carry out the spatial analysis detailed in para 2.2.6. and the creation of Web Apps described in para 2.2.7

A7. Training would be provided on core features. Team training can be arranged but this would be an overview of the available features and possible applications.

RL thanked ESRI UK for answering our questions and advised we would report back to the Forum and return with a response by 16/09/16

End of Meeting

Manchester Housing Providers’ Partnership aims to bring together housing providers and Manchester City Council to work collectively integrating housing, transport, skills and education, health and social care. Our partners are responsible for approximately 70,000 homes in the local authority.

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