Implementation of an Enterprise-Wide Common Street Address Database

A single source of truth at City of Hamilton

The City of Hamilton has numerous enterprise service delivery applications that utilize and store constituents’ addresses. In many cases, street addresses are solicited from the resident in a free form method but were never validated against a common address database. As a consequence, the City of Hamilton had numerous instances of address databases that were not accurate or consistent. These databases are used on a daily basis to communicate to the residents and businesses. There have been cases where these address databases were misused for other purposes and often invalid addresses caused a breakdown of communications. This has led to embarrassment for the City, anger by the residents, and in some cases legal action.

The challenge the City of Hamilton faced was to establish a single authoritative address database, which all service delivery applications can validate against. As there were numerous address databases in various forms, establishing which was most correct and then comparing it to others to get the best of breed was the greatest challenge. The second challenge was to communicate the availability of the single authoritative database, “clean up” existing databases, and encourage application stewards to use the single authoritative database as a single source of truth.

The City engaged an expert in the field of addressing, AGSI, to help collect business requirements, design a solution, and help implement this solution. AGSI has 25 years of experience in providing data solutions to organizations in many industries and across the country. AGSI’s Location Warehouse provided the technical and data solution consisting of a consolidated database model and database clean up of major applications. The software solution consists of Go360™ Address Manager and Go360™ CheckIt address maintenance tools. Go360 CheckIt is a redlining tool for identifying address issues, and a method to deliver addresses to other service delivery applications.

Some of the improvements of implementing this solution include:

• Improving response to customers and service requests 
• Decreasing data maintenance costs by reducing duplication of efforts
• Reducing errors related to repeated manual updates
• Increasing corporate-wide efficiency by providing access to address data within a centralized, documented and maintained solution 

The City also needed an address sustainability model to ensure that addresses are maintained accurately and on a timely basis, by internally identified stewards. In addition, the model would ensure that new or updated addresses would be appropriately delivered or be available to other service delivery applications requiring address data.

Ultimately the solution provided positive results for the City’s enterprise service delivery applications:

• Single Source of Truth - All departments will trust the addresses
• MPAC Revenue Coordination - Address to ARN - tax base revenue 
• Emergency Services - Where everything translates to an address
• Third Parties - City Road Cut Permit program, revenue from utility or telecommunications companies identified by addresses

AGSI’s Marc Curtis and City of Hamilton’s, Senior Project Manger of IT, John Bacon, have been touring the country’s data conferences and sharing their findings and ideas on the value of this solution. Do not hesitate to contact AGSI’s Marc Curtis at mcurtis@agsi.ca, or call him at (905) 908-0064 for more information about the exciting implementation and how it can benefit and add value to your organization.