NI Water comes out top in GIS Awards
28 April 2025 11:36
ESRI 1 (L-R) Michelle Cassidy (NI Water Lead Analyst), Marc Butler (NI Water Asset Performance Engineer), Shanique Davis (NI Water Senior Analyst), Paul McMurray (NI Water Senior Analyst), Andrew Murphy (NI Water Lead Analyst).
NI Water is marking the success of the Annual Esri Ireland GIS awards where the company came out on top in the Data Management category and was shortlisted in the Use of Mobile sector.
These annual awards, which attract submissions from a vast array of major organisations across the island of Ireland, acknowledge exceptional customer creativity and innovation using geospatial technologies across nine different themes.
NI Water was awarded first place for its ArcGIS online system (cloud-based GIS system known as AGOL) Data Backups Solution in the Data Management category. The solution was designed and implemented entirely in-house by NI Water’s Asset Information team, using existing technologies, in close collaboration with colleagues across the business.
The AGOL platform is used by over 500 NI Water colleagues, contractors and consultants to navigate to assets, collect data, share data, analyse data, automate workflows and visualise insights using various AGOL software such as Survey123, Story Maps, ArcGIS for Power BI, Field Maps and many more. These solutions store vast volumes of data in a cloud based datastore, but NI Water identified an opportunity to strengthen the robustness of the system.
Andrew Murphy NI Water’s Lead Analyst explained: “Our in-house team designed and implemented a brand-new solution to provide protection against accidental data deletion, which utilised the Esri REST API framework to extract and prepare all AGOL data.
“The team also used Safe Software FME technology to fully automate the entire process which provides a robust archive of data backups, including attachments such as asset survey photos, which now means our valuable data is secure, backed up and accessible for all authorised users.
“The awards provided an excellent opportunity to observe how other organisations utilise the platforms. It was a valuable occasion for networking and exchanging information among all participants. The standard of entries was excellent, so we were delighted our solution was chosen as the winner in the Data Management category.”
ESRI 2 (L-R) Michael Byrne (ESRI Ireland, Head of Customer Engagement), Shanique Davis (NI Water), Marc Butler (NI Water), Michelle Cassidy (NI Water), Paul McMurray (NI Water), Andrew Murphy (NI Water), Paul Synnott (ESRI Ireland, Managing Director).
ENDS
For further information, please contact press.office@niwater.com
Further information is available here - https://www.esri.com/en-us/arcgis/products/arcgis-online/overview