Understanding Your Readiness for Implementing GIS
Get a better handle on your organization’s readiness to insure a higher probability of success in using geospatial technology and data with a GIS implementation.
“What does a readiness assessment include? How do you go about this?” We start by conducting a comprehensive readiness “exam” – expand each line item below more details…
People skills? Current system evaluation? Data sources and data quality? Training assessment? Organizational technology awareness and maturity? First the targets for the assessment for readiness must be identified and listed, then validated.
Once the targets are identified along with appropriate measures to be used, we build our checklist. We validate the list with you ahead of beginning the work.
We work through all the activities on the checklist until we complete them. If we discover something important along the way, we flag this discovery, and review with you before adding more activities to the to-do list. Prioritizing the checklist is important. Re-prioritizing it may be necessary, however.
We analyze the results of all activities conducted and compile them for a review with the key people you identify ahead of making recommendations. This step enables a collaborative approach to understanding what we determine during the assessment.
You will have identified key stakeholders in our initial validation. We compile a final set of recommendations and will do a presentation of the results and recommendations to your stakeholders.
A readiness assessment will best prepare your organization for planning a GIS implementation, understanding baseline capabilities, strengths and weaknesses ahead of plan development. This knowledge is valuable in understanding costs and will enable metrics to be developed for monitoring the progress and measuring value of the investments in GIS later on. The assessment is a critical part of establishing the start point from which success will be measured.
