Keeping score - What’s the payback from GIS?
Five types of GIS payback
To deal with the variety of measures for services provided by governments, the payback
from GIS has been grouped into five types. These include the following categories of
benefits:
- Productivity Improvements
- Service Level Improvements
- Effectiveness Improvements
- “Home Runs”
- Quantifiable but Unanticipated Benefits.
Productivity improvements and “home runs” are relatively easy to quantify and express
in dollars. The costs can be estimated and cost reductions can be measured. It is more
difficult to place a value on improved service levels, enhanced governmental
effectiveness, and preparation for unexpected events. As a result, the benefits of GIS are
frequently understated, since only the productivity improvements and “home runs” are
considered. It is significant that studies of GIS payback at the federal level have
consistently found that the value of service level and effectiveness benefits greatly
exceeds the value of productivity benefits, often by a factor of 10 to 1 or higher. For
many organizations, the real value of a GIS is not that it helps them do their work
cheaper, but that it helps them do their work better.
As examples are presented to illustrate each of the five types of GIS payback, you will
note that some changes could fall into more than one category. For example, using GIS to
reduce map update effort from days to hours (a productivity improvement) will also
result in citizens having access to more current maps (an effectiveness improvement).
When more than one type of benefit accrues from the same improvement, the payback is
the sum of the benefits.
Productivity Improvements
Productivity (also called efficiency) improvements are usually the easiest benefits to
identify and quantify. Productivity is defined as Output divided by Input. The more
output that results from a given amount of input, the higher the productivity. The implicit
assumption is that all units of output are of identical quality and are thus interchangeable.
When the implementation of GIS technology results in a productivity improvement, the
product and quality is the same as previously. The difference is that less staff time and/or
less money was spent producing that product.
Staff time savings may be realized in the following ways:
- Performing more transactions without adding staff
- Reallocating staff time to other activities
- Eliminating positions.
The following are some examples of quantifiable productivity improvements experienced
by state and local governments as a direct result of implementing GIS technology, in the
areas of updating maps, notifying citizens, and garbage truck routing:
- Updating Maps
- The City of Raleigh, North Carolina, eliminated 2 staff positions.
- Palm Beach County, Florida, reduced staff from 32 to 18.
- The City of Winnipeg, Manitoba, reduced average staff update time
from 3 days to 4 hours.
- Citizen Notifications
- Clark County, Nevada, reduced average staff time from days to minutes.
- Garbage Truck Routing
- The City of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, saved over $1 million in the first
12 months of using GIS technology to support garbage truck routing.
Note that, in all of these cases, GIS technology is used to produce the same product that
was being generated previously. Whether the product is current maps, address lists for
citizen notifications, or routes for garbage trucks, the end result has not changed. The
productivity improvement is the savings in staff time and expenditures.
Service Level Improvements
The level of service is a direct measure of “how much service” is being provided to
citizens. Management or policymakers frequently define service levels as objectives to be
attained. Examples include the following:
- Ninety-five percent of pothole complaints will be repaired within two weeks.
- Emergency medical service response time will not exceed 5 minutes.
- All sewer lines will be videoed at least once every 3 years.
Note that management has reasonably direct control over the attainment of service level
objectives. Some examples in which GIS technology contributed to increased service
levels included reducing response time, reducing travel time, or assuring consistency. The
following are some examples of service level improvements experienced by state and
local governments as a direct result of implementing GIS technology, in the areas
described earlier:
- Response Time
- Dallas Area Regional Transit, TX, reduced average customer inquiry
time from 45 seconds to 10 seconds.
- Numerous emergency service providers use GIS-centric Computer
Aided Dispatch to identify the closest qualified responder and the best
route to an incident.
- Utility Reliability
- Various utilities use GIS with land use projections to plan for new
capacity (mains, treatment plants).
- Identifying Pollution Sources
- The Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District uses GIS to trace pollutants
upstream from a treatment plant to their source, expediting corrective
action.
