Unpacking the Value of Geospatial Strategy
November 2024 | Chris Blackstock, Megha Datta, Prajakta Patil, Ajan Sendhil, and Dr Zaffar Sadiq Mohamed-Ghouse
The importance and impact of geospatial data and technology on most businesses is no longer debated. As highlighted in the recently released Geospatial Council of Australia (GCA) Economic Value report – “Geospatial information projected to contribute additional $81 billion in GDP to the Australian economy by 2034”. However, the challenge remains for many to effectively identify, communicate, and deliver this value, particularly when the path forward includes organisational change and investment.
A Geospatial Strategy is the most effective mechanism for enabling the change and investments necessary to address big business problems and maximise and grow your geospatial function’s impact, value, and economic return on investment. It does this by delivering three key outcomes:
1. “Understanding and Articulating Value” of Geospatial, now and in the future, including how it aligns with business priorities, problems, needs, challenges, and opportunities,
2. Developing a “Clear Actionable Plan” to address a problem, challenge or opportunity,
3. Enabling your “Ability to Proceed” by increasing access to Funding, Influence, and Power.
This article expands on these three key outcomes of a Geospatial Strategy and busts a few common myths and misconceptions limiting the use and impact of this critical tool.
Strengthening the Value Proposition
At its core, a Geospatial Strategy helps you address your big organisational problems, challenges, and opportunities, with geospatial data, technology, people, and capabilities. Fast-tracking the delivery of Geospatial value, impact and change quickly, efficiently, and effectively.
The Geospatial strategy provides a quick, action-oriented approach to identify, assess, and communicate the impact of the problem on the business, the opportunities and options for geospatial improvements, and the costs and benefits (economic, social, technical, and environmental value) to the business. Thereby strengthening the link between Geospatial and organisational value.
While a geospatial strategy initiative may go by many names, including Scoping Study, Requirements Gathering, Market Scan, Operations Plan, Implementation Plan, Business Case, Readiness Assessment, Review, or Assessment, and have a wide or narrow focus (i.e. Data, Architecture, Digital, Applications, Environment, Infrastructure, Human Capital or Ecosystem) the core problems being address usually fall into the following groups:
- Technical Problems: such as old and outdated systems/software reaching end-of-life, overly complex and custom tools increasing maintenance load and risk, or legacy technical components that cannot address modern needs and expectations.
- Financial Problems: reduced budgets, increased costs, and increasing expectations to justify investments, often coupled with an expectation to do more with less.
- Delivery / Culture Problems: lack of governance or leadership, struggle to meet business expectations, lack of skills/capabilities/capacity, team structure not aligned with delivery needs, lack of organisational understanding of what is possible.
- Business Problems: aligning geospatial capabilities and investments with influential business functions and their highest-priority challenges, such as Asset Management, Strategic Planning, and Operational Delivery.
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Developing a Clear Actionable Plan
The most well-known outcome of a Geospatial Strategy is the development of a “Clear Actionable Plan” or blueprint, including projected costs and benefits, for how geospatial should be leveraged and implemented within your unique organisational context and technical environment to address organisations’ problems, realise organisational objectives, drive operational efficiencies, increase economic outcomes, and deliver tangible value and improvements to stakeholders.
A geospatial strategy provides clarity and detail around what needs to be done to address your problem, how you are going to do it (and when), and most importantly, why it should be done. It is delivered as an action-oriented plan.
This plan usually includes:
⦁ a critical assessment of your current problems, challenges and opportunities,
⦁ a value-centric vision of the ideal future state,
⦁ a series of recommendations (including justifications) addressing the key options, actions, and decisions that need to be taken, and
⦁ an implementation roadmap, with high-level costs, to achieve your desired outcomes.
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Securing the Funding, Influence, and Power to Proceed
A good value-oriented plan, however, is not enough to ensure your success, particularly if you are unable to proceed with the required actions due to a lack of money and resources, a lack of influence and support from leadership, or a limited authority and mandate to proceed.
The most overlooked, yet arguably most important outcome of a Geospatial Strategy is enabling your “Ability to Proceed” by increasing your access to Funding, Influence, and Power.
This requires aligning Geospatial with what matters most to the most powerful and influential Ministerial and Corporate Executives and Leaders, ensuring the actions and outcomes are targeted to those stakeholders’ highest priority and impactful business problems, challenges, and needs.
It also requires elevating the focus and language above technical topics like “data”, “integration”, “process” or “upgrades”, to more impactful business topics like “saving lives”, “saving money”, “gaining competitive advantages”, or “reducing risks”.
Finally, it entails building trust, with stakeholder, partners, champions, and sponsors. This can be achieved by:
⦁ taking a highly collaborative and engagement-oriented approach, engaging widely across the business, from business end-users, and core geospatial and ICT units, through to upper management and executive level,
⦁ learning from and incorporating industry and international best practices, incorporating input from industry leaders and SMEs, and
⦁ presenting options and recommendations with a balanced, vendor and technology-agnostic, and evidence-driven voice, including providing defensible and where possible measurable justifications, benefits, and outcomes.
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Success Stories
A successful Geospatial Strategy has the power to create significant impact across every organisation or geospatial program, from large national and state government agencies to municipal governments, private industries across all sectors, and academic and community groups.
Whether you need to secure additional funding, grow business capabilities and impact, modernise legacy tools and technology, build support and buy-in from influential leaders, or deliver transformational change, a Geospatial Strategy can provide the necessary kick-start to get you moving.
Woolpert’s Geospatial Advisory and Innovation team brings extensive experience in developing and implementing Geospatial Strategies for Country level action plans for organisations and Ministries including:
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The Geospatial Advisory team offers decades of experience advising national mapping agencies, ministries, and private industries globally in delivering practical geospatial strategies, architectures, and realistic, fully costed action plans.
Our multi-million-dollar action plans have enabled organisations and governments to achieve their vision and KPIs. The multi-cultural team with diverse backgrounds has experience in understanding not only organisational requirements but also the culture required to deliver sustainable outcomes.
We’d like to be involved and be part of your success.
Have any questions?
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