Within two months of Phase I, we plotted simple maps including thematic mapping of pavement conditions across town. The first decision was whether to use PC-Based GIS versus Large Platform. Garner was one of the first municipalities in Wake County to choose a PC-Based system. It was becoming standard for towns to save money for a direct link into Wake County's GIS rather than proceeding on their own. No need to write code for standard menus.
Output reflects input.
We only needed to be concerned with data, not whether we had a calculation problem in the programming. We could purchase hardware and software with four month's salary of a programmer. We could not do routing for instance, but we didn't have any need to. We could use existing Databases. With a small amount of programming we could customized menus and screens.