The City of Lewisville, part of the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area, has all the of amenities of a city but with the community and feel of a small town. I'm Jason Kirkland. My formal background is in public administration but I've had to teach myself as much IT as possible to get things done more efficiently. Over the years this grew into something more and I now oversee application development, business intelligence and GIS for the city. It's my job to increase our use of existing technologies and to develop apps that increase the city's efficiency and effectiveness while always aiming to reduce costs.

For a long time, our city police and fire departments kept paper maps and floor-plans of schools in physical binders that officers carried in their rescue vehicles. It became a challenge to keep the maps and floor plans updated and to provide the officers with the most accurate information when they needed it.

With Google Apps, we scanned these floor plans and loaded all of them to a 'File Cabinet' page created on Google Sites, which was securely saved in Google's data centers. Now the Police and Fire departments can go to this site from any mobile device with an Internet connection and get the latest versions of these school floor plans instantaneously.

The more we play with Google Apps the more we realize it has rich functionalities. I also created an online GIS Map web application that allowed us to display and manage multiple layers of GIS information simultaneously on Google Maps. By integrating the map with Google Spreadsheets and Fusion Tables, we are able to manage the data layers dynamically through the spreadsheet. This tool liberates, and increases the value of, data that only GIS trained professionals were able to consume in the past. Nowadays, both city staff and citizens can easily interact with the map to get information such as the schools in their zones and the locations of all the fire hydrants around the city with a street view.

There's no doubt these applications help our city employees work more efficiently and make Lewisville a better, safer city.