“What Cannot be Measured…”

Editor's Note: The following is a guest post from Dennis Goreham, retired GIS coordinator for Utah, and a member of the National Geospatial Advisory Committee.

The National Geospatial Advisory Committee (NGAC) has endorsed, as a concept, a paper crafted by the NGAC Governance Subcommittee which seeks to promote the development of a National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) by creating a more precise definition of the NSDI and of a set of metrics needed to measure progress towards the NSDI.

The paper – a Proposal to Measure Progress Toward Realizing the NSDI Vision (PDF) – takes as its central theme the truism that “what cannot be measured, cannot be managed.” It was presented at the December NGAC meeting and resulted in instruction that the Subcommittee begin implementation, including outreach to refine the metrics approach.

The initial categories of metrics selected by the committee address many aspects of the NSDI beyond its original data-centric definition:

1. Societal metrics intended to determine the extent to which geospatial data, processing and applications have become part of the general information infrastructure and decision support process;
2. Environmental measures which describe the full extent of geospatial activities and their economic implications;
3. Data metrics providing evidence of progress toward the initial completion or the ongoing maintenance of framework data layers at a minimum;
4. Technology metrics for the fitness and quality of the underlying technology infrastructure in use across relevant organizations; and
5. Governance metrics to measure progress toward the realization of a national governance structure for the NSDI.

Readers should note that the proposed measures are national in scope, and not merely federal. There are many opportunities, even responsibilities, for the states and for NSGIC to participate in measuring, analyzing, and communicating metrics that will help manage the NSDI.