Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP) - Your Division or District Name Here

Integrated Management Information System

Envision a future with high quality integrated data that is:

Accessible to those who need it
Relevant to each individual’s work
Vital to the fulfillment of legal responsibilities to protect the environment and natural resources.

Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has embarked on a department-wide technology initiative, the Integrated Management System (IMS), a journey to bring that future into reality. The goal is to provide better tools for staff and management to do their work more effectively and efficiently, with less process. IMS will link many of the key regulatory, scientific, land management and administrative information systems through a central information system for easy data management, analysis and reporting.

Project Objectives

Environmental management has evolved to include new strategies such as location-based and multi-media management. It is no longer adequate to view any DEP “place of interest” through a program-specific, stove-piped lens. The department has expressed a need to analyze environmental impacts and outcomes, which would require the ability to view all activities at a location irrespective of media, as well as the public interests within a specified radius of a permitted facility. The department also has an interest in improving customer service, reducing the burden on the regulated community, and protecting recreational properties and lands that play a key role in the health of the environment. This necessitates being able to view a Facility or Site/Parcel comprehensively to improve and streamline interactions with it, while ensuring the protection of the surrounding environmental interests. Creating a single business view of cross program data will facilitate better decision making across the Department and will enable the Department to accommodate the new business processes required in the future to protect the environment and the health of the citizens of Florida.

Expected Benefits

When the IMS is in place there will be:

1. Even more efficient and effective information sharing among our programs.

2. Improved ability to track regulated entities’ environmental compliance records.

3. Effective support of a performance-based measurement management system.

4. Better communication with federal agencies, our other regulatory partners and the public.

An expected benefit of IMS implementation will be that the Department and Staff will have access to enterprise information to better accomplish their mission without regard to the originating system or program need. The system will facilitate better and more timely environmental decisions and allow information to be viewed from an ecological perspective rather than just a program perspective. Applying the FITS II template to a DEP-specific data model will provide compatibility across systems resulting in improved information sharing among states and the EPA. In adopting the model, DEP will benefit from the lessons and accomplishments of other States. The integration and standardization resulting from the use of the FITS II template inherently provides benefits that include:

1. Access to multiple data sources through a single identifier.

2. More accurate, consistent data due to reduced redundancy.

3. Improved cross-program support and interaction.

Enhanced support for environmental managers, including consolidated or integrated reporting, targeted outreach, targeted enforcement and geographically based environmental management approaches. More information about the FITS II data model can be found in this EPA document.