[gis_info] Expectations of the Government GIS Community

[Jim]

How many times are each agency: City, County, State, and Federal
processing, creating, storing, backing up, generating and purchasing
maintenance contracts on software while working on the same geospatial
data?  Building footprints is a simple example.  Another more relevant
issue is Lidar.  How many times is a DEM, DTM, or DSM is being generated
from the very same players and why, it just needs to get built once.  If I
procured a DEM from each level of government and compared the similarities
and differences between them what would the standard deviations, if any.

Citizens, like members of this list, expect that the geospatial community
is following professional ethics and following good judgement when it comes
to expending taxpayer funds.

I talk with the IT folks and they tell me that a position (a Gee Spot) they
call it, is something that never changes but what does is the complexity of
the software that is supposed to organize it.  Sure they say, over beers,
that there is relatively minor changes to the built environment, sure there
are some.  The changes to the 5% of the total inventory does not warrent
95% of the business strategy including support.  They site that the cost to
serve geospatial is the most costly of most of the data IT is responsable
for and because of that cost and the complexitys really warrants a
different approach, they said paper maps were not such a bad idea, and
prior to GIS engineers were doing just fine.

Jim
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