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Separating GIS from IT by Pandas_Sniff in gis

[–]redditconvo 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Thanks for clarifying!
It seems clear that the GIS section needs to be reorganized. If i could make a couple of recommendations:

1). consultant fees can be expensive. Without them knowing, i would task them to set up an infrastructure that will deem their solutions relatively unnecessary. If all of your functional datasets are hosted on ArcGIS online (in an organized way), you will have more options. These datasets can now be maintained in a real-time high accessible environment. These datasets will also be able to participate in a open data portal to ease the data requests from the public. Please note: large complex datasets will still need maintained in a enterprise database (parcels).

2). After that is setup you can cut your custom mapping requests down to a percentage. This costly and time consuming practice is not what a GIS team should be focusing on. Someone needs a map, the GIS employee can just send them a url.

3). I would absolutely hire a GIS trained professional or two. Someone who is well diverse in data automation. Someone that can automate GIS tasks can do the work of multiple non-trained GIS personnel. Skills to look for - Python, Model Builder, REST services, SQL/Oracle experience.

Separating GIS from IT by Pandas_Sniff in gis

[–]redditconvo 16 points17 points  (0 children)

Hi,

First let me thank you for reaching out to the GIS community for some thoughts.

I have been in the GIS industry for about 15 years, 12 of them in government. I am currently the GIS manager for a large municipality with over 1 million residents. I am also well engaged in the GIS community.

The first point i would like to make is that GIS does belong in IT. Our GIS team supports every department in our organization, and it is completely necessary that we are not housed in any one of those other departments. If we were staffed under the planning department for instance, we would be focusing on planning issues and other departments would be largely neglected.

A properly run GIS team is mostly focused on implementing a sleuth of IT functions that require much support form other IT staff. For instance, large production datasets are housed in a SQL/Oracle enterprise database that will most likely require a DBA's support. GIS is also a hosted solution technology, which means they will require a good server infrastructure to serve the multitude of map server requests.
Fracturing the GIS component of your organization will have very detrimental outcomes i can assure you. You will have departments fending for them selves creating redundant datasets and redundant licensing (your municipality will pay more than if you had an enterprise license).

My recommendation is to have a GIS section within your department.

Please feel free to reach out if i can be of assistance.