Meaningful ArcGIS usage statistics for higher ed reporting

[JeanineFinn]

Hello -- We in the library administer an ArcGIS educational license for a consortium of colleges. We have approximately 1500 active users of our license, heavily concentrated (for now) in our intercollegiate environmental analysis program, but rapidly expanding into other areas. 

Our library has been asked by the upper-level administrators at the colleges to provide "measures" of what resources are being used by their students and faculty through the library. We haven't really included GIS support in these kinds of things before, and we are not really sure how best to present our ArcGIS support in a way that fits in the "higher ed leadership" model that may not be very familiar with this platform. But it's been a hugely popular offering over the past two years, we need to include it. 

Are there good models from other institutions out there on how to measure/explain ArcGIS usage in a quantitive way that is slightly more than a spreadsheet of the number of users we have and how much content they have created?

I know there are longer-form assessments out there, and I'd LOVE to be able to do a full report, with qualitative measures and sample projects, but right now we sort of need something quick, quantitative, and meaningful.

Any advice is welcome. Thank you!

[ABishop]

Hello @JeanineFinn 

First of all I want to say ... what a cool way to use GIS!  Secondly, there are a few questions I would like to ask before recommending a method of collection and reporting.  Do you have a way to measure these instances of resource usage?  If so, what is the platform of measure?  Alternatively, would you consider a solution that requires input from the student and faculty like a hub or a survey or both?  Finally, what type of account do you have with ESRI?  Do you own licensing for ArcGIS products?

[JeanineFinn]

Thank you - those are all good questions. Right now we are really only interested in "passive" assessments with the data we already have from our ArcGIS Online platform. I think I am starting with those reports of users for now. Thanks!

[PeterKnoop · Accepted solution]

Do you have any reporting corollaries for other resources you are providing? What measures are acceptable to your upper-level administrators for those? Can you measure the same parameters for GIS? If so, then even if they aren't familiar with the platform, then at least they are familiar with the measures.

As you note, raw numbers, like the total number of users, are not always a good way to quantify resource use. A quick and easy improvement is to look at usage numbers over time, such as how many unique users use the resource each day, each week, each semester? In other words, what is the distribution of the resource's user base across people using it once to those that depend on it regularly? (This kind of data carries sufficient weight with our institutional stakeholders, rather than the raw numbers.)

Such information is available from your ArcGIS Online organization's usage logs. (See an example of how to present such information in a Dashboard: GIS for Everyone...and how to build your own ArcGIS Dashboard to show it!) With a little more effort, you can combine such data with your institution's enterprise directory so that you can tie the data to your institution's roles and affiliations, as illustrated in the two pie charts on the right-hand side of our University of Michigan ArcGIS Usage Dashboard.

This is, of course, an under-representation of GIS use at an institution. It is strictly tied to Esri ArcGIS products, and even for those fails to account for use via Single-Use or Concurrent-Use licensing. (If you have access to your Concurrent-Use logs, then you can integrate that data.)

You also likely have plenty of users using R, QGIS, Google Earth Engine, Carto, Mapbox, and other non-Esri products to do GIS. Some of those can also track and report on usage, but it gets complicated fast.

Another set of quantitative measures we track for reporting center around supporting the users of GIS, and those data are GIS platform agnostic. From our ticketing and work-planning system, we can produce reports on how many GIS support requests we receive, where they come from, and how much effort it takes to resolve them. We can also look at the life-cycle of the requests; for instance, if it is taking an unreasonably long time to assist users, then we can use the data to justify to administrators the need for additional GIS support resources.

Hope that helps!

[JeanineFinn]

Thanks, Peter - this is very helpful. For the moment I've just been doing rough sorts by college affiliation and data of account creation (thank you, OpenRefine) to get a sense of which colleges saw the biggest uptick in users when we went online in 2020. 

And yes, we've also seen a lot more users working on QGIS - a lot more working from home and working on personal machines led to Mac folks wanting something they didn't need a virtual machine for. 

The dashboard is something I'd love to do once we have a few more resources (and time) together. I appreciate the documentation you've shared for this. Many thanks!