Who Needs a Geospatial Strategy?

Who Needs a Geospatial Strategy?

"Strategy is style of thinking, a conscious and deliberate process, an intensive implementation system, the science of ensuring future success" Pete Johnson

If you are a GIS Professional in a leadership position, you and your organization can benefit from a geospatial strategy. This article will delve into what having a geospatial strategy means, how your organization can benefit, and a recommended framework for how to develop and execute one.

Strategy

Strategy is defined as a plan of action or policy designed to achieve a major or overall aim. Or how about, a careful plan or method for achieving a particular goal, usually over a long period of time. What then, is a Geospatial Strategy? Keeping it simple …. it is your GIS/Geospatial business plan for your organization. So now comes the million-dollar question …. why do you not have a geospatial strategy in place? 

Most builders would never build a house without a blueprint to guide them. Anyone who has been a business owner can tell you the importance of a sound business plan. If you lead geospatial organizations, it then makes sense you would have a business plan in place focused on GIS and geospatial applications. In this case, you would have a Geospatial Strategy. If you already have one and are wondering why you should keep reading, then consider if your strategy consists of a vision for where you are going, a strategy to explain the approach you are taking to achieve your vision, and a roadmap for how you will get there.

Over the span of my career, I have often tried formulating a team vision and aligning my team’s efforts with goals and a focus for the upcoming year. Often creating a to-do list of goals that I wanted us to accomplish during the year. I would not have called these strategies, but more like yearly plans. After I started at my current company, I became familiar with the term “Geospatial Strategy.” I quickly realized this is what was missing from my yearly plans, which did not account for the following:

  • Were we fully leveraging our entire ArcGIS Platform and Enterprise?
  • Were my team’s efforts aligned with our long-term vision?
  • Was I maximizing the use of my available geospatial resources: people, processes, and technology?
  • How could we evaluate if we were effectively and efficiently integrating the use of the Enterprise across the organization?
  • Were we all in synch, rowing with the same rhythm, the same stroke count, with the same destination in mind?
  • Was my team’s work aligned with the organization’s goals?

At my last job as a GEOINT Team lead, I spent a lot of mental energy and time trying to figure out the answer to those questions and if we were missing anything that required more effort or attention? In hindsight, I was attempting to implement a Geospatial Strategy, but without a fully thought-out integrated framework and strategy that holistically covered all my GIS operations. The day-to-day tasks were getting done and those somewhat aligned with my yearly goals, but it always felt clunky, piecemeal, and frustrating. Ironically, at the time I had a sign on my desk that read, “Are you fully leveraging your ArcGIS Enterprise?” I could not answer that question with confidence because I did not know enough about what all it entailed, how to do it, or how to assess if I was doing it efficiently or correctly.

With the knowledge I have now gained about geospatial strategies, I wish I could teleport myself back in time to sit beside my former self to guide me in developing a comprehensive Geospatial Strategy while providing onsite guidance, mentoring, perspective, empathy, and wisdom. I had a geospatial vision and a list of tasks I wanted to accomplish and simply lacked the framework to execute it combined with a roadmap and a strategy. Looking back, it is not a stretch to envision the four components that were needed: a vision, a strategy, a roadmap, and a methodology or framework to bring it all together. 

What is a Geospatial Strategy? 

A Geospatial Strategy defines how an organization will use GIS to achieve its goals. An effective Geospatial Strategy is business oriented and holistically connects business needs with people, processes, and technology to help overcome challenges and improve results.

This approach helps you achieve your business/mission goals and outcomes through the application of geography, location intelligence and GIS. Essentially it is your GIS/Geospatial business plan. It is how you are going to get from where you currently are, to where you want to be in the future. It is the approach you are taking to reach your vision of the future, the why. The blueprint and foundation. Its entire focus is to ensure business goals are addressing challenges by providing business driven GIS solutions that enable the business value of GIS. 

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Further, a geospatial strategy should include the following, all of which should support your organization's geospatial mission or purpose:

  • Geospatial Vision: Where we are going, what we are trying to achieve, our destination.
  • Geospatial Strategy: The choices and approach you are taking to achieve your vision and meet your business objectives, the direction, and the reason. Think blueprint or high-level design.
  • Geospatial Roadmap: How the strategy will be executed. The high-level link between strategy and execution. Can include what is to be done, who is expected to do it, and when it must be done.
  • A framework / methodology to develop and execute it. 

Let us explore what it means to have a geospatial vision a little more. A vision is the long-term goal. A vision is having the ability to look forward and gauge the second and third order effects of decisions you make while mitigating the risks associated with them. Providing the motivation to obtain the end state. Keeping momentum moving in the required direction and adjusting as required. Providing meaning and purpose. Maintaining focus. Providing guidance. The Geospatial vision of your desired future state and destination.

“A vision without a strategy remains an illusion.” Lee Bolma

Your GIS vision utilizes your strategy to achieve your full geospatial potential. Often, the work we are doing day-to-day is not synced up with our mission or in support of our vision. The longer we are at a disconnect, the further we stray off the azimuth path of our goals. 

A geospatial roadmap shows what you want to achieve and how and when you are going to achieve it. The roadmap is the detailed plan for how you are going to achieve the geospatial strategy. The roadmap is the prioritized sequence of activities or actionable items (milestones or sub-tasks) you will conquer along the way over time based in phases or by certain dates. The plan for what you “need” to do to implement your strategy. Now lets dive into the framework that pulls it all together, The Approach.

"Success is 20% skills and 80% strategy. You might know how to succeed, but more importantly, what's your plan to succeed? “ Jim Rohn

The Approach

The framework you will use to work on developing and executing your Geospatial Strategy will involve a four-phase approach: Understand, Plan, Act & Revisit.

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Understand

For most of us before we endeavor to start anything, we need to understand what we are getting into. Most of us before taking a family vacation will plan it out before we embark upon it. To properly plan it we need to understand such key things as destination, budget constraints, mode of travel, everything that needs to be accomplished before departing. Often, we make checklists or to-do lists and assign tasks within the family. We research what we are going to do there and plan the day-to-day activities as well. Understanding precedes planning and planning precedes acting. The same applies to your geospatial strategy.

In the Understand phase, we want to define a shared understanding of our organization’s goals, success criteria, and current challenges. We achieve this through engaging in conversations and interviews. Understand what the issue is, where we are, where we are going, what resources we have, who is on the team, what everyone’s role is, and what is missing. The key here is to make sure the conversations are framed around a defined and agreed upon geospatial mission and not a technical or GIS perspective. In this phase, the goal is to understand the following:

  • Mission: What is your organization’s (higher) mission? What is the GIS team’s purpose? Is the GIS team’s purpose nested in mutual support of the higher organization’s mission and customer base?
  • Goals & Objectives: What are your organizational or team’s goals? What are the objectives of the geospatial strategy? What does that look like for the short and long term?
  • Success Criteria: What do you identify as success criteria in conducting your day-to-day mission? What will be the success criteria in implementing your geospatial strategy?
  • Challenges: What are the challenges that your organization is trying to overcome? What keeps the organization’s leaders and managers awake at night? What are the challenges and obstacles in implementing your geospatial strategy? What is your plan to overcome these challenges? What is your plan for navigating around the obstacles? 

You are ready to move onto the Plan stage when you have the following:

  • You have assembled a team of key stakeholders
  • You have articulated business goals and value to stakeholders
  • You have ensured business challenges are understood and agreed upon
  • You have identified high level, potential geospatial solutions to the business challenges

Plan

Here we are documenting the current state and defining the future state while trying to build a road map that takes us from where we currently are to where we want to be and what we need to do to get there. A clear path that the organization will follow to reach its short- and long-term goals. Make a list of prioritized and sequenced activities. Categorize these activities as either people, process, or technology. Rank them according to business value and ease to launch. 

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Develop a list of activities/initiatives that addresses people, technology, and processes, rack and stack them by ease of launch and the value they provide, then lay them out on a roadmap.

With the future state defined, compare it to the current state and assess what gaps will need to be overcome, and what requirements will need to be obtained. Remember, the focus is developing geospatial solutions to overcome business challenges and identifying the skills, knowledge, workflows, procedures, technology, data, and capabilities required to achieve success. Prepare a plan that addresses the following, while classifying your activities as either Process, Technology, or People:

  • Processes: This category includes current, future, desired, gaps, limitations, efficiencies, areas of improvement; This may include product creation, dissemination, analytics, data management, governance, methodologies, or capabilities.
  • Technology: Examples of technology include software, hardware, capabilities, storage, processing, data management, knowledge management, architecture, and systems.
  • People: This is all about your workforce. What are your current strengths and areas requiring improvement? What skills are missing? What are your projected gaps, strengths and areas requiring improvement based on new hires, losses, or changes in roles and mission? What is the cause? What is the plan to overcome and mitigate? What is the risk to delay or ignore? Include considerations for training and professional development.

Now plan and develop your roadmap. Your roadmap consists of the prioritized activities and milestones: These are actionable items to achieve along the way. Often assigning dates helps drive achievement and realization. Sometimes a task or goal can seem unsurmountable due to its size and complexity. The analogy of “How do you eat an elephant …… one bite at a time” comes to mind and helps with this process. Your road map breaks down your strategy into “bite-size” achievable success points that walk you along the process, staying focused on the right priorities and headed in the right direction. It also serves as a reporting mechanism for stake holders or organizational leaders on what you have accomplished, where your currently at and what the plan is in the future.

You are ready to move onto the Act stage when you have the following:

  • Definition of the future state
  • List of potential geospatial activities to get from current state to the future state
  • Prioritization of the activities
  • The first activity is planned and defined

Act

Now you move into action, by executing the following steps within the Act cycle, where you execute each activity incrementally:

  • Prepare: Define, Design, Communicate
  • Implement: Build, Deploy, Enable
  • Operate: Execute, Monitor/Measure, Support
  • Review: Outcomes, Utilization, Usability
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Your team executes the implementation cycles for each activity laid out in the roadmap. Each implementation cycle should result in an outcome.

Understand that you can have multiple act cycles in play with the implementation of various activities at different start times. 

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Revisit

Revisit is a critical phase where you periodically or cyclically, take a step back, revisit your overall strategy. Things change, life happens, priorities get re-ordered or new ones pop up. Your Geospatial Strategy should be flexible and agile. During this phase, evaluate, make changes and adjustments, and start the process again to ensure success.

Geospatial Strategy Approach

  • Focus on the business. How are you going to help your organization be successful and achieve what it is trying to accomplish? The focus should be on the business needs and challenges.
  • Understand
  1. Assemble your team. Who is your executive sponsor, champion, and technical leadership?
  2. Engage with leadership. Department managers, elected officials, decision makers, etc.
  3. Engage across the organization. Analysts, field workers, end users, decision makers, customers.
  4. Identify and address business challenges.
  • Plan
  1. Identify ways GIS can bring business value.
  2. Create a plan that considers people, process, and technology
  3. Prioritize and sequence your work into the people, process, and technology categories
  • Act
  1. Bring your solutions to life using the Act Cycle
  2. Share your strategy and successes
  3. Revisit your strategy
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Bringing it all together. How a well-defined workflow looks from start to finish.

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An example of a geospatial strategy canvas. A great way to keep the entire team focused, keep your stakeholders informed, and can be used as a tool to stay on your charted journey. This should be posted throughout your organization and team’s work area. It should be a refence for a checks and balances guide when revisiting on a regular schedule.

The captain of a ship would never simply load the ship with a crew and start sailing. The captain would understand the reason for the voyage, understand all the moving pieces required to prepare for the voyage, assemble the crew and train it if needed, plan the trip, stock supplies, coordinate fuel stops and resupply, and then embark on the voyage fully knowing where they are going and how they are going to get there with plans in place to overcome challenges that may arise along the way. A good capital understands the mission, has a plan to execute it and then acts (execute the plan). They start with a vision of the journey, develop a strategy, and implement a roadmap to ensure success. 

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As a GIS/Geospatial leader or manager leading your team or organization into the future or guiding them day-to-day through this past year’s trying times, has been challenging enough. As many organizations’ look at 2022 possibly as a time to reset, adjust or realign, having a sound strategy to guide your team over the next 2-3 years is not only prudent, but an exercise in thoughtful and innovative leadership thinking. I cannot think of a better time for those who lead GIS/Geospatial organizations to take a moment to apply some deep reflection in how to get your Geospatial Strategy “House” in order. This coming year is an opportunity to re-evaluate your mission, reset your vision, design a geospatial strategy, and chart a course on a new road map. This will allow you to become better positioned to assist your organization in achieving its goals by overcoming challenges through the utilization of business-driven GIS solutions. I started this article by asking you a question: “Who needs a Geospatial Strategy?” As an answer to that question, I would like to leave you with a list of questions to consider. How you answer these questions will most likely provide the answer. 

  • Is your GIS enterprise accessible, integrated and leveraged across the entire organization?
  • Is it allowing for collaboration, sharing and is it triggering cross-organizational geospatial growth?
  • Are you addressing organizational challenges with driven geospatial solutions that are utilized to achieve the organization's goals and provide the business/mission value of GIS?
  • Are you challenged in proactively seeking out business challenges? 
  • How are you geospatially operating across all your business units: improving collaboration, synergy, communications, integration of capabilities, optimization, all while being results driven.
  • Are your GIS capabilities and resources viewed across the organization as providing force multiplying solutions to complex problem sets, or are they viewed as "dots on a map" or "map making"?
  • Is GIS viewed as an integral part of the organization's business systems?
  • Are you struggling with internal challenges such as governance, data management, workforce development, lack of utilization, proving relevancy or value, or properly structured to respond to emerging crisis?
  • Are you challenged with branding or messaging?

“A Geospatial Strategy is a journey to achieving a vision that integrates GIS capabilities across all business lines of your organization by empowering users to take advantage of your location technology investment. It enables better business decision making by fully integrating location intelligence into business operations. This approach includes considerations of your geospatial resources; the people, processes, and technology needed to meet goals and overcome challenges..” Jim Pardue

Interested in learning more?

Read the information paper; The Approach to Maximize Impact: https://go.esri.com/gs

Ask for help, email: [email protected]

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Jim is a senior consultant who has advised organizations on the exploration and integration of emerging technologies alongside geospatial systems in support of comprehensive geospatial strategy development. He has extensive industry knowledge and experience in the defense, intelligence, government, law enforcement, and disaster response/emergency management sectors. As a Geospatial evangelist and change agent Jim has designed, built and led diverse geospatial teams throughout the DoD in the Army, Airforce, Joint environment, Federal civilian service and academia. Jim is currently focused on geospatial strategy implementation, developing GIS leaders and GIS workforce development. Be sure to check out his articles on GIS leadership and mentoring.



Carlos L. Makowiecki

Jubilado encaminado a la actividad Profesional Independiente. Comenzando conversaciones para decidir la elección propicia.

3y

Thanks for posting!!

Nathan Heazlewood

Principal Consultant- GIS Business Consulting at Eagle Technology

3y

This is interesting thanks James Pardue. We have been working on some things that will interest you: we should get together and compare notes again sometime soon!

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