Part V - Management and Policy

This last major section of the text covers topics that may be regarded as of greater interest to managers than to scientists, but as this is a program for science and management, the section contains useful information. Certainly if you should ever be a part of a team designing a GIS project, the chapters will help you outline the major steps.

Chapter 17 - Managing GIS

17.1 The big picture

Several decades ago GIS projects required laborious data-gathering efforts and the maintenance of what were then large and temperamental computer systems. Today you can carry out an even sophisticated GIS project on a laptop using free or low-cost (or trial!) software based on large datasets downloaded from the internet. But if the goals are more than small-scale research then the economics of the process will be critical: if the setting is the public sector one usually wants to know whether the adoption of GIS will support improved services or at least continued service supply at lower costs, just as a business will seek higher profits.

Still, if the project is to serve a large group (city, region, nation) with reliable and accurate information, someone will have to give the activity a lot of managerial attention, and a reasonable list of things to consider is the Box 17.2 summary of Tomlinson's 2003 list. Reading the brief biography in Box 17.1 reminds us again of the military roots (and continuing trunk!) of GIS; many of the "elders" I have worked with at the USGS came out of the Army Map Service → Defense Mapping Agency → National Imagery and Mapping Agency → National Geospatial Intelligence Agency.

17.2 The process of developing a sustainable GIS

This section lists four overall GIS development phases:
  1. choice (4 stages and within them 14 steps)
  2. implementation (a checklist of 10 items)
  3. management (4 kinds of essential support)
As a scientist I must admit I have little to do with GIS development or management except insofar as I must do my own micro-system design and management. The USGS has attempted to collaborate on large geographical information systems with the military, the US Bureau of the Census, and numerous other federal, state, and local organizations. As an outsider to this process I've not been impressed with the results and might hypothesize that the problems ranged from the technical, through the bureaucratic cultural, to the interpersonal. The stages and steps listed don't appear to focus on these potential impediments (although subsection 17.2.2.10 touches on these problems).

But if you were tasked to outline a process for GIS project development, this would be an excellent place to start.

17.3 Sustaining a GIS – the people and their competences

There may be an assumption that because GIS is an inherently technical problem the human dimension is secondary, but long experience teaches that even if an innovative, large and complicated technology establishes a new environment, age-old human issues will arise. So efforts devoted to team-building will usually pay off.

Chapter 18 - GIS and management, the Knowledge Economy, and information

For the past several decades GIS has been touted as one of the major advances of information technology, yet we find that as it becomes more widespread it may be disappearing as a distinct IT activity. This chapter reviews many of the potential benefits of GIS. As it is more a narrative than a well-structured discussion, I suggest you skim it, underlining points of interest. Admittedly, however, it is difficult to organize the discussion, so you'll have to pick up ideas of interest to your own area of work and research.

I would extract from the chapter especially the caveats, e.g. from Section 18.4:

Chapter 19 - Exploiting GIS assets and navigating constraints

This is another grab-bag chapter, covering such diverse topics as: the law, GIS skills, data frameworks, and constraints/risks. Of interest to us is skills and job opportunities. This class is designed to provide "mid-level" experience (in bold) more general that detailed GIS programming skills and less general than the management issues treated at the end of the book:
Management
Analysis
Technology
Programming
so that you could migrate in either direction as your career unfolds.

You might want to examine the list in Subsection 19.2.3 and see if you agree about the importance of those topics to a course such as ours. How many have we covered (in exercises or discussions), and what would add or subtract from an improved course?

On the subject of "core" geographic information, I was once asked by Nancy Tosta (see Box 20.5), then Staff Director of the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC), what I thought should be the framework for all the base GIS data. This inspired me to think in two directions.
  1. Bottom-up: If you began with a blank screen then you would add an abstract spatial reference system (say in 3 dimensions) then perhaps topography, political boundaries, etc. 
  2. Top-down: Or you could just keep piling on all the data you could find, ending up with a very high "stack" of layers and let users decide what they wanted to keep or use. 
Either approach seemed arbitrary, but the US framework is listed in Subsection 19.3.1. ArcGIS users get a kind of base set of data (17 layers totaling about 17 MB in my ArcGIS laptop installation). But the program comes with a number of CDs and DVDs with several GB of data. Bottom-up you begin with a blank screen; top-down you begin with a rat's-nest of data!

Box 19.6 is a useful introduction to the British national map system. I have always thought it ironic that the more "socialistic" British don't give away any of the national GIS data, but the agencies like the USGS from "capitalist" US provide tremendous quantities of free data! In the past decade the USGS has adopted several framework strategies, which I personally recall as Digital Line Graphs (DLG), the National Atlas, and the National Map, and no doubt there are others unremembered and perhaps on the way; while from the appearance of Figure 19.8 the Ordnance Survey has done quite well.

Chapter 20 - GIS partnerships

Because GIS requires the integration of so many elements, in any practical setting it almost always requires some kind of cooperation. A class like ours probably can't facilitate much collaboration, partly because we are so scattered in space and time, but if you become involved in an actual project it will entail working with others. Although we prove it is possible to do GIS on an individual basis, all the data we use have been collected, compiled, and provided by teams of others, which is what the idea of a (national) spatial infrastructure is about.

An interesting exercise (see Highlights from the previous chapter for Nancy Tosta's question) is to consider what you would regard as the foundation for a regional spatial infrastructure, then examine Figure 20.8 to see if you agree with the FGDC choices. As an environmental scientist, I like to go beyond this 'flat' model and speculate which of the layers are more fundamental than (drivers of) others. Of course this causal tree is always changing. The simplistic view of development is that humans are influenced by their environment, but now humans are the primary shaper of the environment. Still, (spatial variation of) geology is in some sense more a cause of (spatial variation in) agricultural development than the other way around.

Images of the whole world (such as the larger dataset from which Figure 20.10 is taken) often are often cited as a unifying force for human attitudes. Google maps are clearly the latest and greatest example of this potentially consciousness-raising technology. Certainly global data have helped people realize how vast is the human impact on the planet (which of the themes in Figure 20.8 are not heavily influenced by human activities?), but I would doubt whether GIS itself has had a global community-building effect.

The final section of the chapter explores the role of GIS in risk management - and creation. There is no doubt that the first decade of the 21st century has brought a preoccupation with hazards, their magnitudes and uncertainties. GIS (along with the media and an ever denser communication system) has raised everyone's awareness of the existence of threats and their linkages. Although most people are probably at no greater risk of harm than they ever were - and probably less - many of us may feel more exposed to hazards.

Chapter 21 - Epilog

It is difficult to summarize a book of this length and coverage in a few pages, but this chapter would be useful to read as an introduction to the topic. In Section 21.2.4 the authors restate the book's goal as establishing the scientific foundations of GIS. And though no one would doubt the usefulness of GIS in the conduct of science, some may doubt that there is a GI science per se. My own response to the excitement over GIS is to ask three questions:
I won't attempt to answer these questions, but perhaps you have tentative answers based on your own experience in this course?

The penultimate section of this chapter is an interesting insight into the thinking of these four GIS leaders and their colleagues. I've summarized the challenges and linked them to a larger realm of discourse. Although you may have your own ideas for challenges and their association, these are clearly quite daunting.

CHALLENGE REALM
  1 Existence of global data infrastructure DATA
  2 Establishment of a GIS profession EDUCATION
  3 Development of a core GIS curriculum EDUCATION
  4 GIS as a force for greater equity POLICY
  5 Production of global demographic data DATA
  6 Finer-scale demographic data DATA
  7 Shift from top-down products to bottom-up services MANAGEMENT
  8 Development of more powerful data structures SCIENCE
  9 Reconciling privacy and information needs POLICY
10  More powerful modeling SCIENCE