DFO AQUIIS (Aquaculture Integrated Information System)

DFO needed to centralize and standardize the Licensing and Compliance Management Processes, and improve accessibility to this data and decision making, for all associated organizations

Federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans, Canada, Pacific Region, Victoria, Nanaimo and Vancouver B.C.

Client Profile

Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) is responsible for policies and programs in support of Canada’s economic, ecological and scientific interests in oceans and inland waters. DFO recently took over the management of Aquaculture in the Pacific Region from the Province of British Columbia.

The Challenge

DFO needed to centralize and standardize the Licensing and Compliance Management Processes, and improve accessibility to this data and decision making, for all associated organizations (internal to DFO and partner Agencies).

This was a particularly challenging project as DFO was new to aquaculture management and the organization was still developing policies and procedures while that application was being built.

Highlights

The AQUIIS Project represented a full life cycle systems development, from strategy, business process analysis, gap analysis, enterprise data and technical architecture, target vision, to analysis, design, build, implementation and support of an application system to meet these requirements.

AQUIIS supports the complete process of licence application, review and assessment, approval, renewal and amendment, along with associated processes for compliance monitoring, reporting (internal and public) and performance analysis.

The process was started shortly after DFO assumed the mandate for Aquaculture Licensing from the Province and so included interim solutions to enable the new business units to function and collect and manage core data.

AQUIIS is deployed in one data-center in Victoria, and accessible via browser in many locations via DFO network. There are approximately 100 users who access AQUIIS across all the Licensing, Compliance and Assessment departments. In addition there are several hundred external Licence holders (and their representatives) who are expected to register online in order to submit their Condition of Licence Reports.

Highlights of the solution are:

A full SharePoint Portal integration with document management and workflow,
An integrated rich client (Ajax) application to support the business processes,
A RESTful SOA Application Architecture (implemented with .NET Services)
OData data standard http://www.odata.org/
An integrated adhoc multi-dimensional reporting capability
ESRI ArcSDE spatial data warehouse with OGC services
Automated Document generation (using OpenDoc and .DOCX templates),
Automated document scanning and assignment (using QR Codes)
External website allowing Licensees to file Condition of Licence Reports (where data is extracted and validated); 1000’s of documents per year are expected to be processed automatically
Work management and workflow automations using SharePoint and a metadata driven workflow engine
Sencha Touch and PhoneGap (Mobile)
Jira and Wiki for Issue Tracking, Project Management and Collaboration
GIT for version management and release management
Integration with Govt. of Canada Identity Management System (eAccess) for external users

Technologies Used

Oracle Developer Data Modeler
Oracle 11g RDBMS
.NET 3.5, 4.0, 4.5
Sencha Ext.JS
MS SharePoint 2010
Jasper Reports

“Centralizing the data was key, AQUIIS replaces hundreds of spreadsheets, scattered all over the region on desktops, mobile devices and network drives. With centralized data access aquaculture staff can be sure they are all accessing the same information, and that that information is complete and accurate. This is especially important in an industry like aquaculture that is highly scrutinized by the public”.

Fisheries and Ocean’s Canada