November 9, 1999 Web posted at: 8:23 a.m. EST (1323 GMT) by Kathleen S. Carr

From...

(IDG) -- When the Alaska Department of Fish and Game looked at how it was handling its reports during the salmon fishing season, it felt as if it were swimming upstream. Downtime doesn't exist during the two-month season, when the Juneau-based department must monitor the run of thousands of salmon throughout the state.

The agency is responsible for disseminating daily information about salmon catches to fisheries worldwide. Companies that process the fish use the data to gauge how many people they need to hire and how many storage barrels to buy. The amount of fish caught in Alaska affects the market for salmon farmers in Chile, who use the reports to forecast demand in the United States. In addition, several U.S. processing plants are owned by Japanese companies that need to be able to access the information directly from headquarters.

MORE COMPUTING INTELLIGENCE
	IDG.net home page
CIO home page
Make your PC work harder with these tips
E-Business World
Year 2000 World
Reviews & in-depth info at IDG.net
IDG.net's personal news page
IDG.net's products pages
InfoSpinner's ForeSite masters integrations
Oracle powers Web apps
Digging for data
Questions about computers? Let IDG.net's editors help you
Subscribe to IDG.net's free daily newsletters
Search IDG.net in 12 languages
News Radio
	CIO radio
	Fusion audio primers
	Computerworld Minute

In the past, department employees gathered information from several districts, typed the data into spreadsheets and faxed them to a webmaster who manually updated the department's home page—a laborious task that took all day. Updates happened via e-mail; because changes or mistakes sometimes went unaccounted for, decisions such as how many fish to keep and how many to release to spawn were occasionally based on outdated data.

After a head biologist resigned at the fishery in Bristol Bay, which includes biologists, entry clerks and fishery managers, the department realized it needed to formalize its data collection and retrieval system.

According to Carmine DiCostanzo, chief of computer services for the division of commercial fisheries, "When people come in to replace someone, they don't have the institutional knowledge that the original person had and a lot is lost." Demand for a better way of doing things also grew as a result of employee turnover—new people came in who had used more efficient tools in other places.

In September 1996, the department implemented ForeSite Application Server from InfoSpinner Inc., an application server technology company in Richardson, Texas. First the department created a client/server application as a front end for data entry. Now once the data is entered, it resides in a single Oracle database in Juneau and is immediately available to employees around the state. InfoSpinner provides the middleware that hooks into the database and consolidates the information, preparing it for online consumption.

When fisheries decide the data is ready to be published online, the ForeSite application spits it out onto Bristol Bay's home page. The middleman is no longer necessary. Data entry clerks, biologists and fishery managers can post, access and update data in real-time—no more e-mailing updates and hoping they make it to the right people. And fishery managers as far away as Japan can immediately view the data on the Web, saving time critical to business decisions.

In addition to improving the access and accuracy of the data, the application has allowed the department to add new reports and new functionality. Graphs showing historic information such as how many fish were caught and how many were set free in each district on a given day during last year's season are posted alongside current information—an at-a-glance method of comparison that was never before possible.

And the benefits don't end in Bristol Bay. Other commercial fishing areas are eyeing Bristol Bay's system in hopes of emulating it; Alaska's Cook Inlet will be the next region to go online. Probably the only thing that could get the information out to the rest of the world quicker would be if biologists installed computer chips in the salmon as they swam by.

Kathleen S. Carr is a copy editor for CIO.