Building a geospatial strategy, sharing a real world experience - Part 1

I’ve recently been given the responsibility at my job to implement a “geospatial strategy”, whatever this means to the people requesting. Nice, I guess, but I have two conflicting feelings:

1. I’m excited because it feels like it’s a very necessary thing, and I’m happy to be trusted and given the responsibility. From my perspective it’s something that should have been done years ago.
2. The motivations behind are unclear and I fear that I won’t be able to align what I think is necessary with what my hierarchy expects to achieve with it, but I’ll come back to that.

I’ll share my thoughts, discussions, tries and errors, successes and fails in these articles. It will be a series, but I don’t know how many episodes since the process my take a while before anything is achieved. The aim is to give feedbacks on what I’ll try, what succeeds, what fails, in hope that it could help someone else.

This first part will be dedicated to the starting thoughts and researches, the material that I’ll use to guide my though process, and my first discussions with different stakeholders.

Context

Let’s start with some context to understand the situation in which I operate.

I work in a medium sized (for swiss standards) local administration. The city for which I work employs around 5000 people, and is home for around 150’000 inhabitants.

My position is called “GIS specialist”, I’m engineer, I don’t manage people. I’m working in the cadaster department, within which we form a kind of hybrid unit of people working on a geospatial portal and a kind of EDM tool. We are not part of an IT department, but still have some relations. Our unit manage its own servers, not using the same standards as the IT department.

One important thing to note is that the environment I’m working in is very partitioned; departments communicate through hierarchy, but down in the organization chart you don’t get much information. It’s very true for objectives as well, when I’m trying to motivate collective work with other departments, the discussion is usually rapidly steering into: “How can our service position itself?”. But I feel like if we don’t think about the broader picture we won’t have anything to position ourself into.

Getting started

Once I received the “mandate” to setup a geospatial strategy, I started to go straight into literature, looking for feedbacks from other organizations, companies. I quickly realized that I wasn’t even sure what I was asked. What is the definition of a geospatial strategy? What are its objectives? I have to clarify that.

What is a geospatial strategy?

To get started I took inspiration from the ESRI document The value of a geospatial strategy.

A geospatial strategy is a business-oriented plan for how organizations will leverage their geospatial resources (people, processes, and technology) to produce the outcomes it’s trying to create.

Rather simple and generic enough, a plan for an organization around geospatial resources to reach objectives. We have here three concepts that need clarification:

• organization –> define the organizational scope. Do we operate a the company scale? Within a department? Whose objectives do we listen to?
• resources –> what do we leverage to make our strategy successful? Do we act on technologies, processes, all?
• outcomes –> what are our objectives with the strategy?

These three points need to be defined before starting strategy definition, I’ll call this the broad vision for the strategy.

Align the visions

That’s a major step to validate. I made a first round of literature research but if everything I do is not what is expected then it’s all for nothing. To do so I’ll define a vision for the strategy. It will act as a rather abstract and large scale roadmap and define what will be its objectives, its scope and the potential stakeholders it will bring together. A meta-objective if you wish. Once I have this vision, I’ll motivate it and present it to executives commanding the strategy. We’ll have to meet on the terms of the strategy at this point, I hope that through a constructive discussion, we’ll find a way of developing an ambitious strategy, addressing multiple challenges and bringing a diverse set of people around the table. But most importantly that we will align our visions.

To illustrate diverging visions, here is an example:

• My vision for the strategy would include the whole organization, the strategy would listen to most of the main stakeholders objectives and challenges. This would result in a methodology going from large to small scale, trying to define global objectives and building solutions to reach them.
• My executives vision would focus on their organizational unit, defining its objectives and the added value it could bring to the organization. This strategy would start small and would hope to extend to other departments through exemplarity. The department would provide services that other units could request through a set of well defined governance.

Both are valid but one thing is for certain, if we don’t align our visions, the strategy will never answer the expected needs.

My initial proposition

My starting point for the discussion will look something like:

• Organization –> I’ll motivate a strategy that includes the whole organization, in our case the communal administration. From my discussion with other departments, there is a need for guidance around geospatial information, regarding processes, technologies, roles, etc. I believe that including stakeholders from as many departments as possible would help to overcome the partitioned situation we are actually in. This would also allow better coordination of roles, processes or tools.

• Resources –> The accent will be put on developing strong and clear governance. Going from large scale objectives to finer grained solutions, every aspects of the solution will need to be studied before implementation, including technical choices, stakeholders involved, their role and responsibilities.

• Objectives –> We’ll start by looking at the large-scale objectives of the organization. Look at the broad situation and define a common goal for the organization, take this opportunity to bring together the departments by taking into account objectives/challenges from multiple services. It could sound like:

  • Better management of underground networks.
  • Better management and overview of urbanism.
  • Improve collaboration between departments.
  • Act as a local enabler by sharing open data.
  • etc.

To conclude

And that’s it for now. This is really the preparatory part of the job, making sure that the objectives are clear and shared by everyone. Then we’ll be able to look into detailed objectives, planning and implementation of solutions.

For my part, I’ll prepare a broad presentation of the strategy objectives and motivate my vision. If not shared by my executives I’ll have to adapt to align with their view on the objectives.

The next step will then be to listen to the defined stakeholders objectives/problems and formalize the strategy.

I’ll refine these posts as I’m working on the project, but for now this is the state of the reflection.