Words to the Wise?

Governing.com's 13th Floor blog is reporting from Austin, Texas, and the Managing Performance Conference. LAPD Chief Bill Bratton spoke today and impressed the 13th Floor folks with his thesis: Measure What Matters.

"In government, we had a tendency to measure everything and drive everyone crazy with data, rather than measuring what matters," he said.

Chief Bratton was sharing stories about his success with CompStat, a geospatially-enabled management tool that he developed in New York City and has brought to Los Angeles. This is an approach that has started to be adopted by other cities and now, in the case of Maryland, by states.

GIS in the Oval Office?

The Associated Press is reporting that Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani has said that, if elected, he would use a version of the CompStat program that he used as Mayor of New York in addressing issues as president.

"What I'm going to do when I become president is I'm going to use that program to secure our borders," he said during a speech at the Police Officers Association of Michigan's annual convention. "If we did the same thing with our borders that we did with crime in New York City, we could stop people from coming into this country illegally by having a 'BorderStat' program." (via the Chicago Tribune)

Setting aside the political and policy questions (not grist for this particular mill), I note that CompStat is built on a GIS platform, using the geospatial element to organize, analyze, and present crime information.

I doubt that this would really be the first use of GIS in an Oval Office, but this story does suggest to me that the next president might be the first to consciously use GIS as an every day information tool.

That reinforces the need to build an accurate National Spatial Data infrastructure and suggests a need for an interNational Spatial Data infrastructure.