NSGIC Mid-Year Reports: Monday Morning Keynote Speaker

This is the first of what I hope will be a series of reports from the NSGIC Mid-Year Conference, in Annapolis. I'll try to report on as much of this conference as I can, but please understand that this gathering is a marathon and I am a tired old man. (Okay, a tired young man)

The Monday morning Keynote speaker was Maryland CIO Elliot Schlanger. He's new to that post but fulfilled a similar role for Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley when Mr. O'Malley was Mayor of Baltimore.

Mr. Schlanger noted that the issue is not technology invention; it is people and process. And, he said, GIS is one of government's greatest business enablers and decision-making tools.

Mr. Schlanger was an early user of ComStat/CityStat. ComStat was developed by a New York City police officer to allocate officers and resources to where the crime was occurring. It was a success and Baltimore adopted and adapted the idea as CityStat. They used it for crime analysis and expanded the model to other city management needs, such as potholes, infrastructure, and housing rehabilitation.

It served as a real-time performance measurement tool.

Now Mr. O'Malley is Governor and has ramped up CityStat to a "StateStat." Maryland is using it to track crime and service needs and in land-use planning and land preservation.

Among the problems they have identified in trying to bring GIS and traditional IT together are many that most GIS coordinators are familiar with. They have seen some silo-ing and separation of GIS data and users from IT agencies. They also noted a lack of cohesiveness bewteen some state agencies and among levels of government. And there is a disconnect with the customers.

But, e noted, the objectives of both IT and GIS leaders are the same: capability, consolidation, interoperability, and standards.

So Maryland wants to combine traditional IT and traditional GIS to create an enterprise-wide system. There are common challenges and issues:

• Managing state and local data and delivery systems
• Finding ways to resource enterprise GIS.
• Statewide licensing of GIS software applications.
• The need for standards and policies and guidelines that work for all.
• How to sufficiently build the IT infrastructure to work with all of this.
• Deciding what sort of governance will work best.
• And how to pay for all this capability in tough fiscal times.

There were several questions from the audience about the current discussion in Maryland to create a new cabinet-level IT agency. That is now under consideration and Mr. Schlanger is likely to retain the CIO post if hat is accomplished.

Update (3/18/08): Presentation materials from this session are now available on-line.