Many state and local public works agencies are planning to leverage the upcoming infrastructure package from Congress to tackle their growing list of infrastructure planning, maintenance, and rehabilitation needs. Planning for infrastructure development can be difficult when agencies are relying on single-purpose computer-aided design (CAD) systems that don't support a rapid, agile design workflows or today's remote collaboration needs. MicroS...

Water system design and analysis can be costly, time consuming, and challenging for municipal agencies. The combination of CAD, GIS, simulation and analysis features needed to produce a useful model usually means bouncing between different technologies and platforms. Often, it's a marginal CAD-enabled platform that requires export to a GIS platform, or a limited bolt-on tool that is tied to a GIS platform, neither supporting the iterative need...

Congressional funding is right around the corner which means project and approval timelines are shrinking, and different project groups are often vying for priority. With many public works projects competing for funds, it is important to quickly and effectively rally stakeholders and citizens behind a single vision of your proposed infrastructure project and its impact. However, unifying different points of view often requires using different...

A new global study of 167 cities by ESI ThoughtLab entitled, Smart City Solutions for a Riskier World, uncovers key findings about how the most successful cities have advanced both their economic and sustainability goals, even in the face of the global pandemic. They discovered that cities that are rebounding from the pandemic have made economic recovery faster when they make better use of city data to drive better decisions, and advancing the...

The convergence of computer-aided design (CAD) and geographic information systems (GIS) means that many agencies need to find efficient ways to bring CAD data into GIS environments. But bridging CAD and GIS can be challenging, and often means learning new systems and tools. However, there’s good news for agencies that rely on Bentley MicroStation for their CAD needs; the bridge between CAD and GIS can be effortless and doesn’t requ...