How To Justify a Local Government GIS

A couple of years ago, I wrote a piece titled, “The Struggles of a City GIS Manager.” With government budgets being cut 15+%, one of the activities that always seems to be included in the discussion is GIS. When the GIS is up and running, has the GIS manager worked his/her way out of a job? I thought I’d revisit the subject and mention a recent report released on the return on investment (ROI) of King County’s (Washington) GIS after 20 years in service.

At a recent municipal public meeting on transportation I attended, the issue of pavement management was being discussed in detail along with a report from a company hired to rate the condition of road system within the municipality. The Pavement Condition Index (PCI) was reported for each municipal road segment in tabular format. As you can imagine, with ~100 miles of road in the municipality, the tabular list was overwhelming…page after page after page of text. How does one interpret and make decisions based on data that’s difficult to interpret? Of course, I asked whether the data was available in a “GIS format” so that the citizens could more easily visualize the condition of each road segment. The answer was yes, but this was not included in the service contract. Then the conversation turned to using the in-house GIS department (one full-time + part-time) to integrate the tabular data into the municipality’s street data. Someone asked, “Can they do that?” The answer was yes, technically they can, but they are busy working on other projects.

I think one of the reasons that municipal GIS departments seem to always be in the budget-cut discussion is because elected officials, and probably municipal executive management, don’t understand how valuable it can be. The PCI study was a great example. When the city ordered the PCI assessment, it declined the $2,000-3,000 option to have the data delivered in GIS-ready format. However, once a city councilor scanned the gobs of PCI data in the report and understood how difficult it would to interpret the data for the city council, city staff, and the public, the councilor stated, “Our food budget is more than that.” In other words, a no brainer decision to spend the $3,000.

Municipal GIS managers, as much as they may not want to, need to be promoting their services within city government. How about a GIS Day event within city government where GIS departments can showcase their capabilities to the various city departments? Unfortunately, it can’t be a one-time event. This is a continuing education process. People who aren’t knee-deep into GIS have a lot of information being thrown at them every day. There’s no way to consume it all and we shouldn’t expect them to. Therefore, it’s all about consistent reinforcement of the concepts and capabilities of the GIS department so when the engineering or public works department is considering infrastructure work, GIS is somewhere in their train of thought.

On another note, King County (Seattle, WA) commissioned a consulting firm to analyze the benefits of the use of GIS in King County. According to the report, King County set up its GIS in 1992. The analysis was performed for the period 1992-2010.

Conclusions drawn from the analysis were quite impressive: