Santa Clara Valley Water District

Background

The Santa Clara Valley Water District is the main water agency for Silicon Valley in California. The District acts as a water wholesaler and a flood protection agency for Santa Clara County’s population of about 1.7 million. It also works to protect the County’s streams and creeks, facilitating creek restoration and wildlife habitat projects, pollution prevention efforts and natural flood protection.

Issue

The bulk of the data gathered from the Division’s facilities was maintained in separate databases or spreadsheets and was not readily accessible for analysis or reporting. For example, an Oracle database was used for regulatory reporting related to drinking water production and delivery; however, the data transferred to that database was only the data necessary for regulatory compliance reporting.

Solution

The District selected Westin to help them define and implement a new Operations Data Management System (ODMS). The project included the following tasks:

User Needs Assessment

This task consisted of interviewing operations, engineering, information management, and management staff. The assessment was required to prioritize user needs and clearly differentiate between critical needs and “wish list” items.

ODMS Concept

This task required defining an overall system concept for the ODMS that addressed each critical component of the proposed system. The system concept was required to include functional requirements, organization of data; the proposed technical infrastructure of the system, and the critical personnel needed to manage, administer and support the ODMS.

ODMS Implementation

This task required implementation of the data management system, including facilitation of software selection, software installation, and hardware acquisition and installation. Westin was contracted to coordinate the selection of requisite hardware with the District’s information technology staff. Westin will provide training for end users as well as system and database administrators.

Outcomes

The District’s new Operations Data Management System will be a repository for water utility operations and water quality data from on-line instrumentation, and will allow easy access to that data for analysis, troubleshooting and report generation. This will save the District time and money by streamlining the process of managing the data related to their daily operations.