Your GIS Data Is Only as Useful as the People Who Can Reach It

Every town has a map it is proud of. A GIS coordinator or an engineering consultant has spent years building layers: hydrants, storm inlets, sidewalks, street trees, signs, valves. The data is good. But on most days, only the one or two people who maintain it can use it.

The cost of a second copy

When the same asset lives in two places, the two copies drift. A crew replaces a hydrant and the GIS team updates the layer, but the inspection list still points to the old one. A crew finds a valve that is not on the map and writes it on a clipboard that never reaches the GIS desk. A resident reports a sinkhole, and nobody can say whether a crew inspected the storm inlet beside it last spring.

None of these is a disaster on its own. Together, they mean the department cannot answer simple questions. How many hydrants did we inspect this year? Which ones are overdue, and what did we spend on this street?

The answers exist, but they sit in systems that do not talk to each other. Someone has to pull an export, match it against a spreadsheet and ask the GIS team for a count. By the time the numbers line up, the question has moved on.

How to put your GIS to work without more licenses

The fix is not to move off ArcGIS. Your GIS team's work is the most accurate picture of the town's infrastructure that exists, and it should stay that way. The fix is to put that picture in front of everyone who works on the assets, inside the system they already use every day.

That is the idea behind GovPilot Assets. It shows the town's ArcGIS layers on a map inside GovPilot, and staff do their work from the map. The town's ArcGIS keeps the original data. When staff edit an asset in GovPilot, the change goes back to ArcGIS Online, with a record of each one.

That changes the GIS team's day, too. Today, anyone who needs a map or a list of assets has to ask a specialist for one. When the layers live in GovPilot, staff find what they need on their own. The GIS team can spend its time keeping the data accurate instead of answering requests.

What changes for the department

Once the layers sit where the work happens, the double entry stops.

• Everyone gets the map. Crews, clerks and supervisors use the town's layers right in GovPilot, with no extra ArcGIS license for each person.
• Plan work on the map. A supervisor draws around the hydrants on a street, or traces a line along a main. One step adds an inspection to every one.
• Inspections schedule themselves. A saved group of assets gets a recurring schedule and an inspector. Each series shows its next date, and it shows Overdue when it slips.
• Every asset has one page. Its ArcGIS data sits beside every inspection, work order, document, permit and photo tied to it. The page also shows resident concerns and a history of what changed.
• Concerns land on the right asset. When a resident reports a leaking hydrant, staff tie the concern to the hydrant itself. The crew completes the work order with notes and photos.
• The map stays trustworthy. When a layer is read-only in ArcGIS, an edit waits as a draft until the Esri administrator the town names approves it.

Answers you can stand behind

For a public works director, the biggest change is the questions you can answer. The Reports page shows what is overdue, what is due in the next 30 days and which work orders are open. It also shows how many inspections crews finished on time, how many assets the town has and what the work cost.

When a manager or the council asks, the answer comes from work your crews already did. Nobody spends a week matching spreadsheets. Your crews' work stops disappearing into three systems and starts showing up as one clear record.

The question to ask this month

If your town has GIS data, ask a simple question: how many people in public works can use it today? If the answer is one or two, the data is doing a fraction of its work, and your crews are doing that work twice.

See how GovPilot Assets puts your GIS to work.