Environmental Information System (EIS) for Canadian Aquaculture

Final Report

BC Salmon Farmers Association (BCSFA)
AIMAP-2010-P04

Table of contents

Executive Summary
Introduction
Part A: BC FHIS Pilot Project
Part B: Addressing National-Level Needs
Part A - Project Description and Objectives
Objective
Method
Project Phases
User Needs Assessment
Design and Implementation of the EIS
Documentation
Training of Stakeholders
Results

Executive Summary

This project description outlines commitments from both the British Columbia (BC) aquaculture industry and the Canadian aquaculture industry to invest in an innovation technology project designed to improve the environmental performance and global competitiveness of the Canadian aquaculture industry.

The BC Salmon Farmer's Association will implement Part A of this project, which involves the development of a pilot, web-based Fish Health Information System (FHIS) to support their fish health database, to be tested and used by their member companies on the west coast of BC. The FHIS Pilot Project will address Aquaculture Innovation and Market Access Program (AIMAP) priorities by contributing to increased sustainable production, and will also qualify as a green technology with new components designed to improve upon current infrastructure. The FHIS Pilot Project will allow for more efficient data access, upload, download, reporting, and exchange which will improve health management tools, enable collaborative approaches to fish health management, enhance productivity and operating efficiency, reduce operating costs, and improve the environmental performance of BC's aquaculture industry.

The FHIS Pilot Project will serve as a model and lay the groundwork for longer­ term future initiatives to develop a common Information Technology infrastructure for housing and sharing aquaculture data at a national level. To address these longer term needs, the Canadian Aquaculture Alliance will implement Part B of the project, in which they will establish a Canadian National Technical Steering Committee to facilitate the communication of shared user needs for a national - level, web-based EIS for aquaculture, as well as supporting the development of a collaborative funding structure to sustain these activities into the future.

Introduction

This project description outlines commitments from both the British Columbia (BC) aquaculture industry and the Canadian aquaculture industry to invest in an innovation technology project designed to improve the environmental performance and global competitiveness of the Canadian aquaculture industry. The project involves the development of a web-based, Environmental Information System (EIS) to support management of aquaculture databases.

The BC Salmon Farmer's Association (BCSFA) will implement Part A of this project, which involves the development of a pilot; web- based Fish Health Information System (FHIS) to support their health database, to be used by their member companies on the west coast of BC.

The Canadian Aquaculture Industry Alliance (CAIA) will implement Part B of this project, in which they will establish a Canadian National Technical Steering Committee to facilitate the communication of shared user needs for a national­ level web-based EIS for aquaculture.

Part A: BC FHIS Pilot Project

The BCSFA will develop a pilot, web-based EIS to support the fish health database maintained on behalf of their member companies. This project will herein be referred to as the FHIS Pilot Project. The scope of this discreet pilot project will be designed to be tested using provincial-level data, user groups, and collaboration. The FHIS Pilot Project will be designed to develop new functionality, and build upon investments already made by the BC salmon farming industry into their fish health database. The primary functions of the FHIS Pilot Project will be store, analyze, and provide access to data, information, and reports through a user-friendly web interface.

Part B: Addressing National-Level Needs

On behalf of their member companies, CAIA aims to establish a Canadian National Technical Steering Committee to guide the development of national-level IT infrastructure to support management of aquaculture data. This multi-stakeholder forum will facilitate the communication of shared user needs, as well as supporting the development of a collaborative funding structure to sustain these activities into the future.

Part A - Project Description and Objectives

The BCSFA will develop a FHIS Pilot Project to support management of their fish health database. The system will add substantial new functionality to investments already made by the BCSFA into their comprehensive database. The EIS will primarily function to store, analyze, and provide access to data, information, and reports for the aquaculture industry in BC, through a user-friendly web interface.

Objective

The primary objective for developing the FHIS Pilot Project will be to provide BCSFA and its members with a new tool to more efficiently manage the fish health database, enabling collaborative approaches to fish health management   and resulting in enhanced productivity and operating efficiency, reduced operating costs, and improved overall environmental performance for the BC aquaculture industry. This objective will be achieved by incorporating the following features into the system:

• Continuity of access to FishTalk and/or FarmControl; for salmon farmers, plus the ability to extract data already submitted to these programs;
• Secure access to data;
• Administrated data exchange and access;
• Automated workflows that include data exports for regulatory agencies;
• Alerting and automatic distribution of reports via e-mail;
• Automated reporting of missing, out-dated or malformed data;
• Data entry and report creation workflows will be optimized for ease of use in on-going fish farm operations;
• The system will not require exclusive user- knowledge about the data;
• Multiple methods for querying data, including map-based,  site-based, individual company- based, or regional- based queries; and
• The ability to make certain data available accessible through online public access.

The primary approach for the development of the FHIS Pilot Project is a clear focus on user, with a user needs assessment scheduled at the outset of the project and strictly adherence to these stated needs throughout project development. A secondary approach to project development will involve the design and development of an extensible system, acknowledging from the outset that it may be expanded in thematic and geographic scope in the future. The basis of this approach is to open the pilot system to a broader group of users across Canada to support management of a broader spectrum of aquaculture related environmental monitoring data.

Method

The project will be broken down into the following phases:

• User needs assessment;
• Design and implementation of the EIS;
• Documentation; and
• Training of stakeholders.

Project Phases

User Needs Assessment

A detailed user needs assessment is fundamental to perform as a basis for developing the FHIS Pilot Project. The user needs assessment phase will comprise:

• User group segmentation and analysis-understanding the target audience for an application through workshop processes, interviews and surveys of prospective system users.
• Content and systems inventories - ensuring that existing information storage and retrieval systems are included in the system design. Content refers to data/databases, documents, images, emails, faxes, correspondence and reports; and System refers to hardware, software and networks.
• Task Analysis - utilizing methods for decomposing user tasks in order to understand the procedures involved, and to ensure that the information system directly supports these tasks. The common approach to completing a task analysis is to:
  
  
  1. Define tasks;
  2. Define the goal of the tasks; and
  3. List the steps involved to complete the tasks.

Once the list of steps involved in a particular task are understood, analysis is completed to ensure that the information system is designed and implemented to optimize the tasks.

• Information architecture analysis- completion of this critical step in the needs assessment process takes the previous outputs (user segmentation, content and system inventories and task analysis) and structures them into usable forms. Information architecture is the art and science of shaping information products and experiences to support usability and 'find ability' through organization, labeling, search and navigation systems.
• Evaluation of existing databases, information systems IT infrastructure and capacity- completing an inventory of existing databases and infrastructures available and the capacity of the end-user and associated stakeholders to absorb and utilize the system. The development of an IT system must align with the existing, infrastructure and, where possible, leverage existing investments in data gathering and information management.

Design and Implementation of the EIS

The interaction design and information retrieval optimization steps follow from the information architecture analysis in the previous phase. These steps look at the behavior of tasks and processes that users encounter in information systems at the interface level, and focus upon helping users to successfully achieve goals and complete task.

Once the main design steps are complete, iterative mockup and implementation cycles are completed. The goal of these iterative steps is to provide results to the client as quickly as possible so that implementation or design flaws are found as early as possible. During the user needs assessment, key individual will be identified to assist with the testing of components of the FHIS as it is developed. As iterative cycles of development are completed, these individuals will assist the project team to test development of a useful and fully functioning information system. This testing support should be provided people directly involved in the current workflows.

Once the system is finalized by the development project team, it will be released to the users for a full review. In order to maximize the time and inputs of reviewers, feedback will be requested in a structured format.

Documentation

In order to support transparent transition of software and source-code from the consultant to BCSFA, the system will be fully documented. Development of the system will be documented by the project team as the project proceeds and a technical systems specialist will be sub-contracted at the end of the project to develop the technical documentation necessary to support transition to another agency as and when needed

Training of Stakeholders

Associated with the launch of the completed and reviewed FHIS will be a training workshop, planned at an appropriate location (to be determined). If necessary, additional workshops may be planned in other locations. These 1- day training workshops will instruct all potential users in how to use the FHIS, including hands­ on use of the system and support from a user manual.

Results

A series of interviews were held in- person and by telephone to gather information during the user needs assessment. Specific company fish health staffs were identified to be part of the group of interviewees. Interviews began with a presentation and completed with a group discussion.

During in-person interviews, company fish health staff were observed interactively working through tasks which were commonly done in each system. Each interviewee "talked as they clicked' so their actions were documented and discussed. Documents and data were gathered during the user needs assessment process from interviewees.

Hatfield Consultants prepared the User Needs Summary Report - Environmental Information System (EIS) for Aquaculture Project producing a Summary of Recommendations:

• Company Technical Profiles;
• Facility Information;
• Fish Group Tracking;
• Fish - Health Event Tracking;
• Inventory Balance tracking;
• Sea lice counts;
• Reporting; and
• Security.

Based upon the report, the Hatfield development team produced a beta version. This beta version was introduced to the industry key users for their assessment of layout and design. The assessment and introduction was completed through in - person and on line presentations.

The primary goal of building a web-based information system was completed and introduced to key users through another series of in-person and telephone and online presentations. All users were provided with a draft of the BC Salmon Farmers Association Fish Health Database- User Manual.  Users were navigated throughout the database to introduce the functionality. Mock data sets, facilities and fish groups were utilized to demonstrate loading of data and trials of data uploads from internal data sheets were demonstrated.  The key users were instructed to load their facility names and fish groups and to upload data from their internal databases. This was an important step in evaluating the new database for ease of user navigation and use and to identify any problems.

The evaluation phase is completed and the key user groups have committed differing levels of effort to complete this phase. It has identified problems with one company's ability to upload raw data from the templates produced from their internal database. At present all companies have successfully uploaded data into the database.