Effective SDI Leadership: The Antithesis of Good Management Practice?

February 27, 2008 By: David Arctur, Dennis Bellafiore, Todd S. Bacastow

The Pennsylvania Map (PAMAP) is a partnership between the state, local, and federal governments and private industry. The goal of this effort is a complete, high-resolution, GIS basemap of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania that will serve as a model for a national topographic map. PAMAP is expected to enhance Pennsylvania's technological infrastructure, economic competitiveness, and protection against natural and manmade disasters; it will be a crucial resource for public- and private-sector planning and decision-making.

Based on our experience developing PAMAP, we present lessons learned and pillars for success that we recommend be applied within the geospatial community working to develop spatial data infrastructures (SDIs) such as The National Map. SDIs are complex living systems created by people; therefore, the problems are rarely straightforward, and the solutions never clear-cut. (If they were, we would probably have a form of The National Map right now.)

An SDI is based on a different set of circumstances that are in contrast to those normally faced by managers of IT. SDIs emerge when potentially dissimilar local and regional geospatial data networks learn how to communicate and share information. Thus, success in the development of an SDI requires leaders and organizations more concerned with providing a technical capability than with following conventional management practices. SDIs are led, not managed. The paradox is that effective leadership of an SDI requires rejecting many of the long-established principles of management, including unity of command.

Management as Usual

Henri Fayol (1841-1925), who has been described as the father of modern operational management theory, was one of the most influential contributors to modern concepts of management. He proposed that there are five primary functions of management: planning, organizing, commanding, coordinating, and controlling. His principles have been considered as a classical organization theory that is universally applicable to every type of organization and activity. Fayol suggested that it is important to have unity of command: an accepted bureaucratic concept that there is only one person in charge. It assumes that a strict hierarchy is both normal and preferred.

SDI as an Open Partnership

Whether it's a team, an alliance, a partnership, a squad, or a platoon, organizations have learned that by working together, they gain more benefit from their budget dollars. Plus, if the organization's communications and geospatial information infrastructures are designed with collaboration in mind, it doesn't cost anything to gain the benefit. In successful collaborations, all participants find that the value received from the partnership exceeds the value available to them acting independently. It's a win-win-win — a win for you, a win for me, and a win for the collaborating community as a whole.

Every organization expends a great deal of effort collecting and agreeing on the information requirements and the roles and responsibilities that make the partnership successful. However, this effort is misdirected and wasted if the organization has not provided the right groundwork, the right framework, or more precisely, the right level of systems thinking to the effort. For success, it is imperative that the organization builds its SDI on a partnership framework using open and democratic processes that are appropriate to the complexity of the system ("Thinking at the Process Level").

The groundwork includes creation of policies that define the roles and responsibilities for data collection, storage, and dissemination, along with management roles and responsibilities required for the partnership. The framework of such policies provides the foundation and structure for the collaboration, so by analogy to physical construction projects, it has come to be known as the Reference Architecture (RA), essentially a strategic plan for coordinating PAMAP's users, data, and services ("Thinking at the Operations Level"). (The term "architecture" is unfortunate, since it conjures up images of software and hardware, but the planning followed the process in the ISO "Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing" [ISO 10746], which results in a document called an "architecture.")

Scientists' need to share information led to the invention of the Internet as a platform that enables inter-organizational sharing to take place. The leadership in the community had a vision that the technology would allow science to thrive in the face of government and business forces of change that were driving down the investment in science ("Thinking at the Leadership Level"). They envisioned Web hosts as the service components that enable data exchange and processing over the Internet; thus the technical architecture has come to be characterized as a Service-Oriented Architecture.

Open communication in science is fundamental to practicing good science. Open access to information and analysis take place throughout the discovery process, right though to the commercialization process. Scientists demand openness as a community practice ("Thinking at the Communications Level"). The experience of the Pennsylvania collaborative mapping partnership, PAMAP, in developing its RA provides useful guidance for others who seek to gain the benefits of well-planned collaboration.