Education Summit Workshops
During the Esri Education Summit in July, 2025, we held a series of Governance Best Practices workshops:
Managing ArcGIS in Higher Education: Providing Access and Support
- Providing access
- Funding, support and collaboration
ArcGIS Governance – Developing Policies and Managing Content
- Upcoming changes, key concepts
- Content/Storage Management
ArcGIS Governance – Managing Credits and Users
- Credit Management
- User Management
ArcGIS Governance - Monitoring Usage and System Health
- Monitoring Usage and Health-checks
- Communication to stakeholders
Goals for the series were:
- Discuss best practices for Managing ArcGIS in Higher Education
- Evolve Best Practices for managing Content/Storage
- Evolve Best Practices for managing Users
- Evolve Best Practices for managing Credits
- Evolve Best Practices to implement ongoing governance tasks (monitoring usage, health checks, etc.)
- Evolve Best Practices for proactive management of content (by users)
- Discuss support, collaboration and communication models
Key Messages:
Governance Goals
- Implement effective lifecycle management of content and users
- Operate within the bounds of existing institutional policies
- Operate within the bounds of license allocations
- Have the right data in the right place with right access
- Maintain security of users PI and data
- Maximize value of IT spending
Considerations
- Credits are cost
- May have to consider alternative solutions – increase storage, buy credits
- Storage is not unlimited, and it incurs costs
- May need to remove content and/or budget for alternative storage solutions
- Providing one's own infrastructure is not a free alternative for SaaS offering
- It comes with significant real-dollar costs as well
- Add-on licensing (StreetMap Premium, Premium Feature Data Store) is an option
- Will potentially reduce credit-based costs, but increase fixed-dollar costs
Takeaways:
Understand your usage
- Understand your storage and credit consumption.
- Implement periodic health-checks and monitoring.
Institutional Policies
- Evaluate data governance practices and policies for other systems (e.g., Sharepoint, Google Drive, DropBox, LMS such as Canvas, Blackboard, etc.)
- Align ArcGIS with these data retention policies.
Collaboration
- Collaborate with IT and legal stakeholders to verify and implement relevant practices and policies for ArcGIS.
Communication
- Formulate a communication plan for your ArcGIS users.
- Have proper offboarding messages.
- Proactively encourage users to manage their content.
Timing
- Start planning now, so you can make changes on your schedule.
- Do not wait until “crisis mode’ / last minute.
Slides
Slides from the workshops, elaborating on the messages above, are attached in PDF form.
Additional Resources
The series of blogs below could be used as additional resources.
For any additional questions, please provide feedback here, contact your Account Manager or highered@esri.com.
