This governance journey example is shaped and shared by Sam Palmer, Assistant Scholar, GeoPlan Center at the University of Florida. Thanks to Sam and the University of Florida team for sharing their experiences and lessons learned.
The Challenge
The University of Florida has thousands of students, faculty, and staff who rely on ArcGIS across an enormous range of disciplines. The majority of that usage flows through ArcGIS Online (AGOL), and for years, the platform hummed along without much formal oversight.
UF first stood up its AGOL instance in 2010, but meaningful adoption didn't take hold until around 2014. In those early years, the approach was largely hands-off — and for a while, that was fine. But as usage grew, so did the complexity of managing it. Data accumulated, users came and went, and feature storage crept upward. Then, in 2023, administrators started seeing a warning at login that made one thing unmistakably clear: the platform was at capacity.
That moment was the catalyst for a governance effort that has now spanned three years and touched nearly every corner of how UF manages its ArcGIS environment.
Setting Goals Before Taking Action
One of the most important lessons UF learned early on is that effective governance will not be achieved without first establishing goals. Before diving into the technical work, the team took a step back and defined what they actually wanted to achieve:
- Justify the Esri site license to UF leadership
- Develop a clearer understanding of who is using the platform and how
- Reduce feature storage
- Establish a formal user offboarding process
- Eliminate non-SSO accounts wherever possible
- Proactively monitor the platform and communicate with users
These goals shaped everything that followed. Some have been achieved. Others are ongoing. All of them remain relevant.
Understanding the System: Reports, Data, and Dashboards
Source: https://ufl.maps.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/0b96868c3d8742a38e01aca762aeef80#
The governance journey began with a simple step: downloading the member and item reports from AGOL. These CSV files, available to anyone with admin privileges, contain a wealth of information. Sorted by feature storage, they quickly revealed that a small number of users were consuming an overwhelming share of the platform's storage.
The team started by reaching out to the top 10 users directly, then expanded to the top 100. The approach was deliberately personal. Emails addressed users by name, referenced specific items, and required a response. Tone matters, the more it felt like a real conversation and less like an automated alert, the better the results. In many cases, feature layers had been created by mistake, contained data that was no longer needed, or could simply be converted to file storage without any loss of functionality for the maps that depended on them. The key, always, was educating the user, not just asking them to delete things.
Targeted outreach produced fast, meaningful gains. But it wasn't a long-term solution on its own.
Automating the Monitoring Process
Manual report downloads are a starting point, not a strategy. To monitor the platform continuously, UF built an automated pipeline using Python scripts that download the member and item reports daily and load them into a university-managed database. A custom status table was joined to each member record, enriching the data with contextual information — college affiliation, student versus faculty status, and more. Aggregated views derived from these tables are fed back into AGOL, where they power dashboards available to users with appropriate permissions.
Those dashboards serve distinct audiences and purposes. One is built specifically to demonstrate the value of the AGOL platform to UF leadership and help justify the cost of the site license. Another gives college-level administrators visibility into their own users. The daily monitoring pipeline also generates an automated email summarizing changes in user count, item count, and feature storage. When a spike appears, additional scripts identify the responsible users and trigger outreach to begin the conversation about reducing their footprint.
It's worth noting that UF's approach — using an external database — is just one path. Other universities have built effective monitoring workflows entirely within the platform. There is no single right answer, only the answer that fits your institution's existing infrastructure and expertise.
Single Sign-On: A Game Changer
If there is one governance recommendation that stands above the rest, it is this: get Single Sign-On (SSO) configured as soon as possible, if you haven't already.
Before SSO, tracking who was using ArcGIS across campus — and which products they were using — was largely a guessing game. That changed completely once UF moved to SSO. Because both ArcGIS Pro and AGOL authenticate through the UF identity provider, administrators can now see who is signing in, when, and with what product. That visibility is foundational to nearly every other governance effort.
SSO also offloads a significant portion of user lifecycle management to the university's identity infrastructure. When a user separates from the organization, their ability to authenticate is automatically revoked — no manual intervention required.
Offboarding: A Policy, Not Just a Process
SSO-managed authentication solves the access problem at separation, but it creates a related challenge: when a user can no longer log in, they can no longer access their data. UF developed a formal offboarding policy to address this, grounded in a simple principle — give users enough advance notice to make informed decisions about their data before access ends.
The policy uses last AGOL login date as the primary signal. The university already grants students access for three terms after separation and faculty for 30 days; UF chose the more generous threshold — approximately one year of inactivity — as the trigger for beginning the offboarding sequence. This ensures that users who are still authenticating through the university's systems will retain AGOL access for as long as their organizational login remains valid.
After one year of inactivity, all content in the account is set to private and removed from groups. After an additional six months of inactivity, the user and all associated content are deleted. The entire process runs via Python scripting against the AGOL API. To date, UF has set more than 3,000 users' content to private, representing over 50,000 items.
Users who are still affiliated with the university but haven't logged into AGOL for over a year can inadvertently trigger this process. The solution is straightforward: encourage active users to log in regularly, and communicate clearly so they understand why it matters.
Keeping Student Access Free
UF's Esri site license is supported through various entities on campus. This structure keeps the platform accessible to the student community while ensuring that heavier institutional users contribute to the cost of sustaining it. Getting this balance right — and being able to defend it to university leadership — is one of the direct benefits of the monitoring and dashboard infrastructure described above.
Communication Is Governance
Technology and automation can take you far, but governance ultimately runs on communication. UF uses several channels to stay connected with its user base:
All users receive emails at least twice per year covering current policies, reminders, and updates. New users receive an onboarding email when they sign up. Users who are consuming significant feature storage receive targeted outreach. AGOL's built-in popup and welcome message features are used to surface timely information directly within the platform. And UF maintains a dedicated AGOL landing page that serves as a central hub for governance documentation, campus policies, educational resources, and FAQs. This helps reduce the volume of one-off questions that reach administrators by giving users a place to find answers on their own.
Key Takeaways
Governance is continuous. It is not a project with a finish line. The platform evolves, the user base turns over, and storage pressures return. Building systems that monitor and respond automatically is what makes ongoing governance sustainable.
Start with goals. Before touching a single report or sending a single email, define what you are trying to achieve. Goals give shape to the effort and help you measure whether it is working.
Understanding your users is everything. Knowing who is on the platform, what they are doing, and how much they are consuming is the prerequisite for every governance decision that follows.
There is no universal solution. UF's approach reflects its infrastructure, personnel, and institutional context. The principles are transferable. The implementation details may not be.
Education beats enforcement. Users who understand why governance policies exist are far more likely to cooperate than users who feel managed. Every outreach interaction is an opportunity to build that understanding.
Looking Ahead
By prioritizing governance, UF has moved from a reactive posture — responding to storage warnings and cleaning up after the fact — to a proactive one, with real-time visibility into platform health and the infrastructure to act on what it sees. Feature storage and member counts are now manageable, which creates room to make deliberate decisions rather than urgent ones.
One of those decisions currently under consideration is whether to extend the platform through ArcGIS Enterprise. Hosting certain high-storage use cases on university-managed servers could relieve pressure on AGOL, but it comes with real costs: server infrastructure, software maintenance, migration overhead, and staff time. Similarly, AGOL itself offers the option to purchase premium feature data store capacity, which carries its own cost-benefit calculus. Weighing these options against each other — and against actual, well-understood usage data — is exactly the kind of analysis that good governance makes possible.
The work is not finished — it never will be. But University of Florida is now in a position to approach what comes next with clarity, data, and a plan.
A Note on Community
Nearly everything described in this article was shaped, at least in part, by the broader higher education GIS community feedback. Throughout various meetings, the ideas, approaches, and hard-won lessons shared by other higher education colleagues and blogs like this one, have been invaluable. If you are working through similar governance challenges at your institution, this community is one of your best resources — and your own experience is something worth contributing back to it.
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“One of the most important lessons UF learned early on is that effective governance will not be achieved without first establishing goals.”
-Sam Palmer, University of Florida
