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Oregon receives Special Achievement in GIS Award

The ENTERPRISE INFORMATION STRATEGY AND POLICY and Office of Governor Ted Kulongoski have been selected to receive a "Special Achievement in GIS" award at ESRI's 29th Annual User Conference.

The Oregon Geographic Information Council (OGIC) was created by Executive Order of the Governor and is comprised of State agency directors whose agencies have a direct business need for geospatial datasets and geospatial services. OGIC members also include representatives from local, Federal and tribal agencies. OGIC is the ‘tip of the spear’ in a governance model and high-level vision developed together by the GEO and CIO’s offices in Oregon. This vision called navigatOR, its aim is to deliver more coordinated and efficient government services, and reduce duplication through coordinated geospatial investments across state agencies. The aim is to help every state agency operate effectively as part of the State’s IT Enterprise.

The navigatOR vision brings together seamless statewide geospatial data layers and services with a governance model that includes a framework of committees that council OGIC. The governance model developed by GEO includes more than a dozen consensus and volunteer-based data standard groups called Framework Implementation Teams (FIT). The Policy Advisory Committee (PAC) provides strategic planning, budgetary, and policy development, and the GIS Program Leaders (GPL) serve as the technical advisors to the OGIC. Together these groups, with volunteer participants from all levels of government, help create and deliver geospatial datasets and services to every local, state, tribal and federal agency that does business in Oregon.

The ELA combined with the state’s GIS standard and OGIC-based governance model will encourage rapid growth of navigatOR. The standards developed will eliminate the redundant development, storage, and distribution, of all state owned geospatial datasets. Developing data and services once and using them many times, for many different purposes, saves taxpayer dollars and ensure transparent and consistent answers to questions and problems state agencies face. Relieving agencies, at all levels of government, from unnecessarily copying geospatial information greatly lessens the burden on the state technology infrastructure. The result is clearer communication by providing a single authoritative source for Framework geospatial information.

Now, GIS and geospatial investments in Oregon are managed as a true enterprise resource. Business users receiving benefit from navigatOR include public, and local, regional, tribal, and federal government partners. These new geospatial infrastructure and services are aimed at delivering better value, illuminating redundancy, facilitating IT sustainability, and providing transparency at all levels of government. A good example of these new benefits is the Stimulus Tracker applications. These applications allow the public and state budget analysts the ability to see where Federal and State stimulus dollars are being spent allowing an unprecedented level of transparency across multiple state departments. In the absence of OGIC, navigatOR, the GIS Standard, the ELA, statewide GIS layers and geospatial capabilities the Stimulus Tracker application would not have been possible.

This award is given in recognition of their foresight and commitment to coordination between the Oregon Geographic Information Council, the office of the CIO, and Governor Ted Kulongoski’s Office towards the fulfillment of the values and goals stated above.