Managing a non-centrally funded GIS: How the city of fort worth and other U.S. cities manage

Managing a non-centrally funded GIS: How the city of fort worth and other U.S. cities manage

Robert W. Finkle
President
IT Nexus, Inc., 10129 W. Dartmouth, Suite 9304
Lakewood, Colorado 80227,

Shirley S. Sanger
Assistant Director
Information Systems and Services, City of Fort Worth
1000 Throckmorton Street, Fort Worth, Texas 76102

Enterprise GIS and the Non-Central Funding Issue
Some cities have a centrally appropriated budget to build and manage their GIS. Many cities, however, must contend with managing their GIS based on annual contributions from other departments. Non-centrally funded GIS programs can experience a great deal of uncertainty or maddening oscillations in what the GIS program can accomplish from year to year. In truth, the advent of non-centrally funded GIS programs is a hallmark of the maturation of GIS technology. In the early 1990's, GIS technology advanced to the point where it was truly capable of supporting client-server architecture and distributed computing - what we now know as Enterprise GIS.

Prior to achieving this technological watershed, GIS systems were (in fact had to be) implemented as back-room mapping and analysis systems. This kept GIS in one or perhaps two Departments and "in the room down the hall where you go to get a GIS map prepared". These early GIS systems commonly were implemented, funded and managed by a single department. The jurisdictions that implemented department-centered GIS in the 1980s have been expanding their systems during the 1990's to support enterprise GIS - GIS that integrates geographic data for the entire organization and provides desk-top access to any worker who needs access. While GIS industry literature has been heavily focused on the technical opportunity of this change, there has been little discussion of how organizations are facing the institutional challenges of accommodating this change and supporting these new enterprise-wide GIS systems*.

This paper focuses on what the City of Fort Worth and a few other organizations are doing to manage the enterprise component of their GIS systems, asking the questions:

Who is responsible for what?
How are the central resources of the enterprise system funded?
How are funding needs determined, coordinated and approved?
What issues are being encountered as GIS managers attempt to create a sustainable funding environment for the enterprise operation of GIS?

Funding Enterprise GIS at the City of Fort Worth

Environment
The City of Fort began its enterprise GIS initiative in 1996 after more than ten years of experience working with several department-based mapping systems. The core components of the City's GIS server database (parcels, lots, street centerlines and zoning) were completed in mid-1999. The GIS is currently accessed by seven of the City's departments, with additional departments expected to come on-line as the program matures.

The City's Information Systems and Services (ISS) Department manage the enterprise components of the GIS (the server and four GIS staff). The GIS Manager reports to one of ISS's six Division Managers.

Responsibilities
As part of the its implementation planning for enterprise GIS, ISS worked with the City's departments to reach consensus on the critical issue of responsibility for managing and maintaining the GIS. In short, it was agreed that responsibilities would reflect the client-server technology architecture of the GIS: ISS is responsible for the "server side" and departments are responsible for all things on the "client side" of the equation.

In practice, this means that the City's departments are responsible for: assigning staff to update the GIS data components that are "owned" by the department's work functions, paying for the GIS software they need to access and analyze the GIS data stored on the server, developing user applications, and training. ISS's GIS group is then responsible for: managing the GIS server, performing database administration, purchasing server software and hardware, administering the purchase of department GIS software, coordinating (not delivering) training, performing some application development, maintaining the common digital orthophoto data, and providing GIS consulting assistance to the departments.

* Indeed this issue cries out for research and discussion on such topics as: institutional models for enterprise IT and GIS decision-making; funding and accounting practices for enterprise IT/GIS; best practices for optimizing IT/GIS investment in training and application development; approaches for developing and retaining IT/GIS staff.

Budgeting
Under the Fort Worth enterprise model, the City's Departments pay for their own GIS software, applications and data maintenance staff. But how does the City pay for its enterprise GIS support staff and its server hardware and software?

In October of 1998, the City's entire ISS budget (including GIS) moved to a service fee basis. The City employs two simple revenue generation devices to fund the enterprise components of its GIS program: a connection fee and an hourly rate under which the ISS GIS staff bill their time back to departments. The connection fee is a monthly fee assessed to each department PC that has been given a log-on account to the GIS server. The connection fee is calculated by ISS to cover its hardware and software costs for GIS, the cost for the acquisition of some new data (digital orthophotos), and the portion of its staff cost associated with database administration and server data management.

The City of Fort Worth operates on a 2-year budget cycle. So every other year, ISS will review its costs and revenues and recalculate its connection fee and hourly rate for GIS staff services. ISS publishes the rate schedule at the beginning of the City's budget cycle so the departments can determine the monies they need to budget or GIS access and support.

Issues
A primary issue recognized by ISS is that with a large portion of their GIS funding relying on the charge-back of staff time, they may not be able to completely cover the cost of all their GIS staff. If the model was strictly followed, this would mean ISS could be faced with laying-off or reassigning GIS staff. To avoid this highly disruptive event, during the early years of the program, ISS will subsidize the GIS program. The goal of achieving total reimbursement for the GIS program through fees and service charges to departments, however, remains.

How Other Jurisdictions Fund Enterprise GIS
To compare and contrast Fort Worth's method of funding enterprise GIS, we polled the experience of four other public agencies who have significant experience with managing enterprise GIS and contending at some level with the issue of non-central funding. The agencies that participated in our poll were:

City of San Jose, California
City of Arlington, Texas
Clark County, Nevada
King County, Washington

Table 1 summarizes the information collected from each of these agencies as well as the City of Fort Worth. The information has been categorized into three major sections:

Environment: reporting the date the jurisdiction started their department-based automated mapping programs (AM/GIS), when their enterprise GIS programs were initiated, the GIS software being used, the number of participating departments and department staff, the title and reporting structure of the individual responsible for managing the enterprise component of the GIS, and the number of staff assigned to the enterprise GIS program (including the manager).

Responsibility: listing the responsibilities assigned to the enterprise GIS group and those assigned to the departments who utilize GIS. Budget: reporting on the jurisdiction's budget cycle, the methods used to pay for the enterprise component of the GIS budget, and the primary vehicles the jurisdiction uses to review and coordinate enterprise GIS budget development.

Table 1 How Some Jurisdictions Are Funding Enterprise GIS

Comparing the enterprise GIS funding systems being used by Fort Worth, San Jose, Arlington, Clark County and King County (see Table 1) one can see some important similarities. All of these jurisdictions have moved the GIS Manager or Coordinator role into the organization's Information Technology department and all of the jurisdictions rely on departments hiring the staff necessary to update the data components "owned" by the department. More interesting, however, are the differences between the funding systems. The most notable differences relate to three issues:

the extent to which departments are given autonomy in making GIS software purchases
how jurisdictions fund their enterprise GIS support group
the methods used to develop, coordinate and review the enterprise GIS budget

Central or Decentralized GIS Software Procurement

Fort Worth, San Jose and King County require their departments to pay for departmental GIS software, and departments are allowed to select GIS software from a variety of vendors. Arlington and Clark County have implemented systems that centralize the purchase of GIS software with the enterprise support group - these two jurisdictions pay for all of the organization's GIS software from the General Fund**.

The jurisdictions that allow decentralized (department driven) procurement of GIS software do so because of the strength of the department-based GIS systems that were in place at the time of the enterprise GIS initiative. The state of GIS technology is such that heterogeneous software environments can be supported under the enterprise model of a central GIS data server. But there are costs to a heterogeneous software environment that our polled jurisdictions recognize and admit to. Maintaining an enterprise GIS in a heterogeneous software environment can impose additional costs for middle-ware, operating system software and staff training, as well as for the promulgation and maintenance of standards and on-going system administration. King County has recognized another issue with decentralized software procurement: with expenditures spread across divisions, departments and sections it is difficult to get a handle on the organization's total IT investment and support costs. It is equally difficult to monitor and manage the strategic direction of these investments. The recognition of these issues has become acute enough at King County that the County's Council is requiring the organization to document their total cost of IT, perhaps as a prelude to improving the County's strategic management of these resources.

In fact, Arlington and Clark County report their system of centralized control over the procurement of GIS software is a direct response to issues of cost efficiency, standardization and strategic resource management. At Clark County, this has been taken to the point of also

** Arlington's Technology Services Department purchases all "core" GIS software for its departments. Departments must pay for any specialty software (vendor provided extensions and third-party applications) for which they have won justification.

centralizing the development of all GIS application programming to ensure standardization and re-usability.

Funding the Enterprise Support Function
Our poll also found a difference in how the jurisdictions are funding the enterprise component of their GIS. Two of the jurisdictions totally fund their enterprise GIS support function through money received from their user departments. At the City of Fort Worth, this is accomplished from a combination of GIS server connection fees and charging staff time back to departments. King County employs a similar approach that allocates the bulk of its fixed costs to departments based on the number of "view access" software licenses owned by each department. King County supports the other portion of its program costs by charging back staff time based on a range of GIS services that are "purchased" by the County's departments.

The funding method used at the City of San Jose is the most unique. San Jose's enterprise GIS function is totally funded by an existing capital project. In addition, San Jose's departments also are required to fund their GIS programs through special projects or levied fees. To date, the City has been unwilling to support GIS through operating funds. This has introduced a great deal of uncertainty into GIS program budgeting, with departments "scrambling" each year to pull their budgets together. San Jose's enterprise GIS group is facing a real challenge with its upcoming budget because the capital project that has funded them will be completed.

At the opposite end of the spectrum is the method employed by the City of Arlington and Clark County to fund the enterprise component of their GIS. The General Fund supports the enterprise GIS function at both of these jurisdictions. This is of particular interest because these organizations also purchase the GIS software needed by their departments. Further, at Clark County the enterprise GIS group also develops 100% of the GIS applications needed by its departments. This method of funding enterprise GIS reflects each jurisdiction's political commitment to maximizing cost effectiveness and the enterprise management of their IT/GIS programs.

Coordinating the Enterprise GIS Budgeting Process
Our poll found that the methods used by the jurisdiction to coordinate their enterprise GIS funding process are highly influenced by the method being used to fund the GIS program. The City of Fort Worth's coordination method is the least formal. It relies predominately on the publication of their connection fee and rate schedule and a trust that departments will appropriately budget for the fees they need to pay for GIS.

The City of San Jose and King County also rely on their user departments to fund enterprise GIS, but the GIS Managers of these jurisdictions spend considerable time in the formulation and coordination of their budgets. Both work with their user departments to understand and develop the GIS budget picture well ahead of the jurisdiction's formal budget cycles.

At the City of San Jose, the GIS Coordinator meets monthly with departmental GIS Managers to discuss program needs and upcoming budget requirements. As the City's formal budget cycle develops, interdepartmental agreements are formulated and signed that spell out agreements on sharing staff time and cross-departmental charges that will occur to satisfy everyone's GIS program needs.

The King County GIS Manager establishes the enterprise GIS budget and department cost allocations and communicates these to department representatives at least 2 month ahead of the County's formal budget cycle. Throughout the year he meets routinely with representatives of each department's GIS program to coordinate budget and program development needs. The GIS budget is coordinated and reviewed through a succession of formal committees: the GIS Coordinating Committee, Business Area Committees (that represent multiple departments and that review the entire budget for each business area), and an Information Resource Council (representatives from Council and the County's executives that perform a strategic review of the entire IT budget).

GIS budget development at the City of Arlington and Clark County is performed in tandem with each jurisdiction's standard budget process. Much like at King County, both jurisdictions work through a formal committee process that includes committees representing departmental needs up to executive committees.

Clark County, again like King County, has developed an enterprise budgeting model that is organized to diminish department-centered budget advocacy in favor of business area service delivery. Business Area committees representing all the departments associated with a community of interest area (e.g., public safety or land development) review a comprehensive budget package that includes the IT and GIS components associated with delivering business area's services. The charge of the Business Area committees is to assess priorities and evolve a balanced approach to meeting service objectives.

Conclusions and Recommendations
Organizations that have grown their GIS out of department-based initiatives may find they are struggling with establishing a stable funding environment as they expand to enterprise GIS. This can be particularly true in organizations where GIS has become recognized as a single department system instead of a resource of the enterprise. In these environments funding for enterprise GIS may have to rely on contributions by a department benefactor or the existence of a capital project to support the program.

Our review of several city and county jurisdictions with enterprise GIS systems shows that the most stable programs have worked out some critical issues relating to the institutional placement and role of GIS. Among these are:

GIS has been formally recognized as an enterprise enabling technology that provides essential services to most or all of the jurisdiction's departments.
GIS is a section or division within the jurisdiction's IT department.
A GIS Committee, headed by the enterprise GIS manager with representatives from each department, has been formally institutionalized and is used routinely as a method of coordinating department activities and administering the overall GIS technical program.
GIS operational funding and program outcomes are a clear and visible component of the jurisdiction's formal budget process and are part of the jurisdiction's executive budget review process.
A Policy Committee with executive representation is involved in overseeing and reviewing the GIS program.
The enterprise GIS manager, as well as department-level GIS supervisors, are not just technically administering GIS but are actively involved in a continuous process of promoting and delivering GIS benefits to users.
The GIS Manager is actively building a coalition of support among managers and executives for recognizing GIS as an essential information system tool to the organization and establishing General Fund support for enterprise GIS operations. We would recommend that any jurisdiction building or managing an enterprise GIS program to continually work toward these institutional outcomes.

References

Babinski, Gregory, GIS Manager of King County, Washington; November 10, 1999; telephone interview.
Edwards, David R., Assistant Director of the Center of Enterprise Information Technology; Clark County, Nevada; November 12, 1999, telephone interview.
Irons, Russell, GIS Manager of the City of Arlington and Julia J. Hunt, P.E., Water Information Services Manager; November 12, 1999; telephone interview.
Sanger, Shirley S., Assistant Director of Information Systems and Services of the City of Fort Worth, Texas; November 10, 1999; telephone interview.
Walton, Jon, GIS Coordinator of the City of San Jose, California; November 5, 1999; telephone interview.