Beyond Enterprise GIS in Local Governments

What’s Wrong With Enterprise GIS?
The conventional definition of Enterprise GIS has included a core staff of highly trained GIS professionals maintaining an organization’s GIS data and the rest of the staff (theoretically) accessing this data using viewers (e.g., ArcView, GeoMedia). However, organizations that implemented this model found that few staff have become proficient in using complex viewers, which require a substantial amount of training (like any software with high functionality and flexibility).

In one City government whose definition of Enterprise GIS included licensing viewers for every desktop PC and providing each user with four hours of training, the result at the end of one year was extremely disappointing—only two users in the entire City government (one in Engineering and one in Planning) were accessing GIS through their viewers. One year after all of the training and deployment of viewing software, virtually all of the GIS analysis and map generation that was being done in this City was still performed by the core GIS staff.

The deficiencies of the conventional definition of Enterprise GIS are the following:

Access to GIS is not usable by most staff
Most business processes are not taking advantage of the organization’s investment in GIS
Other enterprise applications have not been “spatially enabled”
The core GIS staff is spending most of its time making maps instead of making updates, enhancements, and standards.

As a result, GIS is failing to achieve its potential for impacting the achievement of strategic objectives or producing the greatest payback for these organizations.