ArcGIS Governance in Education: Proactive Content Management by Users

[GeriMiller]

INTRODUCTION

As ArcGIS Online usage grows across educational institutions, it is important to establish processes and procedures for managing content. Some of the management tasks will be performed by Administrators. However, users of ArcGIS should also be guided and encouraged to manage their own content.

Users taking actions proactively, throughout their tenure at the institution, can help reduce the amount of storage and content that is accumulated in ArcGIS Online and can result in better curated data and apps.

Creating such guidelines and communicating them with users consistently is a key piece of an institution’s data governance strategy. This is part of a broader message of governance in Education - setting institution-wide standards and policies that apply to how ArcGIS is administered. A governance plan for managing ArcGIS can help institutions plan for growth.

The purpose of this blog is not to address everything that goes into a governance plan, rather, to focus specifically on actions users can take to proactively manage their own content – not only at graduation and departure, but throughout.

It is part of 5 blog series:

• Blog 1: Content and Storage Management
• Blog 2: Credit Management
• Blog 3: User Management and offboarding
• Blog 4: Monitoring Usage and Health-checking your ArcGIS organization
• Blog 5: Proactive Content Management by Users

PROACTIVE CONTENT MANAGEMENT BY USERS – UNDERSTANDING

Understanding institutional approaches with similar technologies

Consult your IT colleagues/centralized IT support within your institution to evaluate whether communication strategies or touch points exist to guide users on proactive content management with other institutional systems (e.g., Canvas, SharePoint, Google Drive, DropBox, etc.). Coordinated messaging and shared guidelines can help users deal with common needs across multiple institutional systems.

Some ArcGIS specifics may need to be added to shared approaches, however,  leveraging your colleagues’ expertise makes a great starting point, can save time and effort overall, and equips users with more intuitive or transferrable knowledge.

Emerging best practices and examples

The idea is to do proactive content management throughout the span of students attending the university, or faculty/staff working there - not just upon graduation. Best practices for such policies, and proactively communicating them, are emerging. At the time of writing this blog, there are no consistent policies across educational institutions, and often there are not a lot of education or communication examples of guidance to users on what to do with their content while they work or study at the institution.  Even if there are policies, they vary significantly between institutions. Below are examples of different approaches:   

• University of Florida
  • ArGIS Online Cleanup document for users – see attached PDF.
• Esri Netherlands Education Story Map
  • Tips to Manage Items in ArcGIS Online (click for English translation)

If interested in messaging specifically related to offboarding (and not throughout the span of attending/working at the university), examples are in the ArcGIS Governance in Education: User Management and Offboarding blog.

PROACTIVE CONTENT MANAGEMENT BY USERS – BEST PRACTICES

The sections below outline suggestions for best practices on proactive content management by users, as well as how to communicate such practices with users.

Proactive Content Management

• Proactive planning and discussions (especially for research projects and content)
  • Provide guidance to users early in the process in terms of options for managing and transferring content. In a scenario where a student works with ArcGIS on a project, and they graduate, it could be time consuming for Administrators or other project members to figure out what to do with the content. The account may have accumulated 100 items, and only several of them are needed, yet PI or other project members, along with Administrators, must figure out what is to be kept.
• Update metadata
  • Provide guidance on proper metadata, including known tags to flag important content.  
• Delete ‘test’ or unwanted/unnecessary items
  • Provide suggestions for data management in a system that has a finite amount of storage. A student or researcher doesn’t need to save v1-v4 of a dataset when they are testing things out.
  • Ensure Recycle Bin is enabled to provide protection against mistaken deletions.
  • Share Delete Items part of the ArcGIS Documentation, which has a check-list of “Before you delete” processes.  
• Dispose of groups, if not used
  • Suggest that groups that have been created, yet are not used, are disposed of.
  • Share Manage Groups documentation.
• Consider best place to store ‘large’ items in the long run
  • User education and automated, proactive messaging are a great way to tackle use cases where there are individual "big" hosted feature layers and/or individual "big" users whose hosted feature layer use adds up.
  • Additional suggestions are in the ArcGIS Governance in Education: Content and Storage Management blog.
• Consider timeline that items should persist in organization
  • Even though this communication is meant to inform users of ArcGIS on what to do throughout their presence at the institution (not just upon graduation), proactively share timelines of how long content is kept in general.

Communication

 Once put in place, the above guidelines would need to be communicated with users. 

• Send periodic reminders with guidelines – at least once a semester.
• Empower users to perform these actions by themselves, yet provide information on where to go for help.
• Script Communication – collaborate with IT to potentially script the communication.
• Consider placing excerpts in course syllabi or assignments - especially with GIS-focused courses. This could be a learning opportunity to understand cloud/content management models, credits and costs - especially since once students are employed in GIS roles across various industries, they will need to understand these business models. In private or public sector, the availability of licenses and credits is much more restricted than in Education. 

CONCLUSION – NEXT STEPS AND WHERE TO GO FOR HELP

Invariably, there is complexity associated with the various options above. What is important is that good stewardship of resources is maintained. The most important takeaway from this blog is to start proactively communicating and guiding users of ArcGIS how and when to manage their content throughout their tenure at the institution.  

Some of the solutions above will continue to evolve, and we’d like you to be part of this journey – a contributor with ideas, processes and workflows.

Please share any comments and feedback here. If you have a workflow in place that has worked, we’d like to hear it.

For any additional questions, please contact your Account Manager or highered@esri.com.