Your Questions Answered – The Path to Geospatial Excellence

StevenAustin · ‎09-19-2024

At the GIS Managers Summit in July, attendees were able to submit questions for our live panel. While we had some great answers, there were dozens of questions we didn’t have time for, so we’re going to answer them here!

At the Summit, @JamesPardue2 (Jim) talked about the Path to Geospatial Excellence, the five pillars, and how these serve as key concepts to help GIS Managers.

Here are some of your questions answered, and if you have more questions, please post them here-

What has worked at a government/organization level to move GIS into core services at an organizational budget level instead of individual department/user usage?

Great question. The first step would be to figure out what those organizational core services are and who owns them. Next, I would determine how GIS is currently supporting those areas, and if not, how it could be supporting those areas. If it is, what are the examples of use cases and success stories, and the value GIS is currently providing in these core areas. You could even realign the GIS services you provide to be focused more on these core areas rather than individual departments. Years ago, I supported the Mecklenburg County Police Department, and they had their GIS assets and resources aligned in two simultaneous methods. The first was that each precinct (department) was assigned a GIS SME. Those GIS SMEs were also assigned to service police core functions, i.e., homicide, burglary, etc. and be the SMEs in those core areas as well. Personally, I think this is a great approach and aligns GIS resources more in line with the organization’s mission and core functions. I hope I understood your question and answered it well enough for you.

My organization has their own strategic plan and departmental visions. How do I incorporate geospatial strategy and governance to complement that so a geospatial strategy isn't just "another piece of paper" and can be followed?

Either create a separate geospatial strategy or a supplement to the existing organizational strategic plan. Either way, the intent here is to align GIS resources and efforts for the future in support of the existing strategic plan. The first step is to do some study and analysis on the existing strategic plan and vision. Then go through a process of developing a geospatial vision and strategic plan that is aligned with supporting your organization’s mission, vision, goals, and priorities as laid out in their strategy. If one of my organization’s corporate goals as part of their strategy was to increase public engagement through the innovative use of mobile applications, then there are a variety of ways I can leverage GIS technology to support the achievement of that corporate goal. Once I find out the details on the goal and its supporting objectives, I can then go back and assess the feasibility of a public facing ArcGIS Hub site that can support increased customer engagement through spatial maps and apps and create specific apps for mobile devices that have a location aspect to them. Alignment is key in how GIS can be leveraged to overcome challenges identified in the corporate strategy and developing solutions that support the organization achieving its goals and priorities.

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For organizations that have found success in their path to GIS excellence, what percentage of your time is spent above the water vs below the water?

Typically, I would say most organizations spend 90% of their time below the water and 10% focused above the water. Often, we find that many of the challenges experienced below the water are resolved by effort placed above the water. Below the water I may have slow adoption of our ArcGIS Enterprise and limited usage across the organization. This is not necessarily a system/technology issue but becomes an engagement and capacity issue. At the core of the issue may lie problems with lack of awareness in how to use the technology, lack of knowledge what the capabilities are, and limited or no training in how to employ the technology. Those are all issues that require above the water solutions and attention. Its hard to pick an exact percentage but I would offer that at a minimum geospatially successful organizations spend 25-30% of their time above the water and the remainder below the water. At a minimum.

What is the difference in job duties between a GIS Manager, Director of Geospatial Services, and a Geographic Information Officer? Is it possible to get copies of these job descriptions?

It really depends on a few things. Is there a difference between a GIS manger and a Geographic Information Office (GIO)? Yes, and there should be. What should separate them is their level of responsibilities, level of impact, the level of the organization and where they sit in that organization. To put this in context, if you lead a GIS team in a small county or are the single GIS asset, it makes sense that you are most likely operating in a GIS manager capacity and role with GIS manager like responsibilities for that level. And you are most likely assigned within IT or another department within the organization. If you are at a state level, impacting funding for GIS at the state level, and responsible of GIS data training across state agencies and GIS data management and acquisition for the state, you are most likely operating as a GIO. Especially if your counter parts within the organization are the Chief Information officer and/or the Chief Technology Officer. The same comparison can be made for a local gas utility company versus a corporation the size of ExxonMobil. Does a GIO sit at the same level of other executives within an organization, such as the COO, CTO, CIO, or CDO? In a smattering of organizations but we are not there yet. As far as copies of job descriptions, I would recommend go onto some of the most popular job search sites, to include USA jobs for federal openings, and do searches for these various job titles. Once you have several across various industries, conduct a comparison.

Esri News -- ArcNews Summer 2002 Issue -- Placing the Geographic Information Officer Within an Organ...

The Rise of the GIS Director (govtech.com)

Which comes first to start with, governance or strategy?

This is one of those - what comes first, the chicken or the egg questions. Is there a hard rule? No, there is not. Do we have a recommendation? Absolutely, based on what we see happening through our customer interactions. While we do have customers come directly to Esri asking for assistance with creating a governance document, we see many customers that we work with to develop a strategy, whereas the strategy naturally leads to the need for governance. It is in the strategy process, that we often address challenges and pain points that an organization’s staff are experiencing. This is often where the need for governance arises. Think of strategy as providing where you are going to go and what you are going to do along the way. Governance is the process for governing how you are going to get there. There are certainly instances of when an organization may be severely struggling due to a lack of governance and have a need to address it now. In most instances we see customers through the strategy process, that do not have governance yet. At Esri we recommend starting with a strategy and then leading into governance.

What ratio of time is recommended for GIS managers to spend doing technical work versus strategic planning and communication work?

It really is based on your mission, priorities, and focus, but generally we recommend 25-30% on strategic planning (see five pillars) and 75-70% technical focus. See previous question for a more detailed explanation.

For a future summit it would be great to discuss ROI in more depth and communicating value. While this is diverse and variable, are there templates or standard approaches to how one can quantify value, whether for a specific project or GIS implementation?

We do plan on addressing this topic at future GIS Manager Summits. While we do not have any templates, we can provide some URLs to resources and references on this topic.

Why is the role of Chief Geospatial Officer not more prevalent?

As a community we need to collectively work together to develop messaging, branding, and a professional development path forward. We need all three of these and need to be consistent across the profession. This is a good topic of discussion at a future GIS Manager’s Summit.

When prioritizing requests how do we manage times when we say no although that leaves the requestor without a solution?

I’m not sure we should ever really say no to a point that it leaves a requestor (customer) without a solution. We should perhaps approach this as a matter of prioritization and availability of resources. I’ve never flat out said no to a requestor, not without offering alternative options or solutions. I may not be able to fulfill your request now, but I may get to it in five months and in the meantime, I offer perhaps a temporary 75% existing solution. Or I could fulfill that request if I had the budget to hire additional resources and perhaps you would be willing to contribute to that in some way. If you are having to turn away requestors, enlist them to your cause. Keep track of these and construct a report showing the business you’ve had to turn away and the impacts those choices have had on the requesting business units. Or offer up to train someone in that particular business unit as a user and enable them to work on that request. If the only option exercised is to state “no”, I cannot support this, then you are potentially losing a customer for life. You’ll notice I am using the word “customer” to describe someone that has requested a GIS service. That is because we should view our requestors as customers because as GIS professionals, we provide a service. We should take a more business minded approach to how we operate. When funds and budgets were tight, I’ve even worked where the GIS team was reimbursed for the services we provided. Consider options and alternatives versus a flat out no is my suggestion.

When you talk about the value priority, how do you define value?

From a business perspective, value is a function of doing things better than your competitors. From a GIS perspective value is how GIS is being leveraged to support the organization’s day-to-day mission and operations, how it is leveraged to realize the org’s vision, how is it contributing to the org accomplishing it’s goals, objectives, and priorities while overcoming challenges and obstacles.

Three fundamental questions to ask when determining the value that GIS provides to an organization:

Determine what drives value with your organization, and then ask how GIS is supporting this?
Determine what value drives your customers, then ask how GIS services are supporting this?
Determine what drives the competition (if applicable), and ask how is GIS part of the solution to countering this?