Planning PPS's Enterprise GIS Platform

Routing school buses. Tracking work orders. Monitoring facilities and assets. Understanding and engaging with communities. Planning and communicating about school area boundaries. Developing and implementing school policies. Reporting to board members. Tracking equity issues. Analyzing population and demographic trends. Allocating resources. Measuring performance.

Nearly everything beneath the Portland Public School District’s operational umbrella has a spatial component. Over the past several months, our consulting team has had the privilege of working with staff from PPS to explore what a richer set of geospatial tools and capabilities might mean for the District. Our team has facilitated a series of cross-disciplinary needs assessment and strategy development workshops to help PPS evaluate options and articulate a vision for an enterprise geographic information system (GIS). Based on outcomes and findings from these workshops, PPS executives have recently determined to move forward in developing and implementing this new resource for the District.

Providing guidance and helping to elicit and define the geospatial needs, goals and opportunities of diverse stakeholders is a key part of the Gartrell Group’s practice and one we pursue with enthusiasm. We’re firmly of the mind that geospatial technology is unifying by nature, and we delight in helping organizations explore and discover ways that GIS may be used to create new efficiencies and to move beyond silos and jurisdictional firewalls. Please get in touch if you’d like to discuss what an enterprise GIS capability might mean for your organization.

Our location intelligence quarterly update

Is it already July?

Usually, by this time of year, things slow down a bit, as many organizations’ fiscal years have come to a close. But not this year. This year we continue to be busy well into the summer!

We have a lot going on;

• Bryce and Tim just returned from Texas, where they met with a new client in the energy sector to discuss configuring our Performance Atlas to meet their needs. The requirements and refinement process will take up the next few weeks before we begin development. We’ll be sure to post more on that as the project proceeds.
• we’re continuing to working with the City of Portland’s Public School Administration to develop a GIS platform in order to extend location intelligence across business lines, with the initial focus on mapping out safe walking and biking routes to each of their 64 elementary and middle schools. You can read about our adventures in testing, as well as our two part series on developing a GIS-based methodology for Safe Routes to School route finding. Part 1. Part 2.
• we’re wrapping up a consulting project with the folks at Hennepin County, Minnesota where we made use of the brand-new URISA GIS Maturity Capability Model,
• our two-year project with Seattle City Light to provide Strategic planning and ongoing location intelligence support services is moving along nicely,
• we’ve wrapped up Phase 1 of configuring our Performance Atlas web application to provide the Etisalat team with a hosted solution that will increase their location intelligence related to performance across sales, marketing and facility planning business lines. We anticipate work on Phase 2 will start up sometime this summer.
• we’re kicking off a project with Oregon’s Department of Fish and Wildlife to bring the popular hunting and shooting ranges map to mobile devices,
• back in the Spring, we configured a web application to provide a client with a hosted location intelligence solution providing web access to college campus, floor-by-floor, viewing and updating of facility conditions and assets. We are now improving that application so that our client can make it available to colleges throughout the country.
• and of course, we continue to provide hosting services to many happy clients!

Just because we have a lot going on doesn’t mean that we’re too busy to talk to you. If you are in need of some GIS consulting, or need a web application for your GIS data, or need a home for your GIS data – or just want to talk – please don’t hesitate to contact us. We’re here!

Using the URISA GIS Capability Maturity Model

At the Gartrell Group, we are all about helping organizations make the most of locational information. Our work can be organized into three major categories:

• Strategy - helping organizations assess needs and develop or refine their strategies for effectively serving the geospatial needs of their customers.
• Development - designing, developing, and supporting clients in the roll out of web and mobile software tools tailored to their unique requirements and workflows.
• Hosting - our cloud-hosting options are home to many organizations’ geospatial data and apps.

A recent strategy consulting engagement has been with Hennepin County, Minnesota.  We are working on a multi-faceted project that is focused on increasing executive sponsorship for the County’s GIS program and on helping to enhance collaboration among the many lines of business served by the County’s GIS office.

Introducing the URISA GISCMM

One tool that we’ve utilized in this effort is a brand new assessment survey by the folks at Urban and Regional Information Systems Association (URISA) called the GIS Capability Maturity Model (GISCMM). The GISCMM is a comprehensive survey that aims to provide metrics to “enable GIS managers and organizations to gain understanding and insights about how GIS is implemented and operated in their organization.” It is made up of two parts; the Execution Ability Assessment and the Enabling Capability Assessment.

The Enabling Capability Assessment focuses on assessing the status of an organization’s data, technology, and geospatial infrastructure, while the Execution Ability Assessment focuses on the ability of an organization’s staff to leverage data and technical resources to serve particular goals and functions.

The URISA GISCMM was developed by some of the most influential and experienced members of the GIS Community. The result is an extremely comprehensive look at an organization’s geospatial capabilities informed by metrics that range across topics of personnel, technology, data, governance, and coordination among stakeholders. The survey is designed to facilitate easy comparison with a developing industry standard in each major category of measurement.

One of the interesting elements of the assessment is a radar chart infographic that is used to depict the relative “maturity level” of an organization for each metric. A chart with circular results will show a fully robust organization without any need for improvement (let’s be clear, a fully robust organization without any need for improvement is purely theoretical), while a chart with valleys cut into it will identify areas in need of improvement.

Establishing a Baseline Metric

If used properly, the results of the survey can help an organization identify areas in need of improvement, and can be used as a metric going forward. Not only can the survey be used as a tool to measure individual organizations, but once many organizations have participated, their results can be combined to give a decent picture of the current state of GIS.

The URISA GISCMM is a brand new tool and the folks at Hennepin County are among the very first in the nation to participate in the process. The results will help their (already healthy) GIS program zero in on the areas that need improvement, and will give them a metric on which to measure that improvement.

We are excited to add this tool to our quiver!

Give us a shout if you’d be interested in having us assess – and assist in strengthening – your organization’s location intelligence.