History of GIS Initiative

In mid January 2000, North Dakota's Chief Information Officer (CIO) was contacted by a representative from the GIS Technical Committee asking that ITD revisit a request submitted by the North Dakota GIS Steering Committee about a year earlier. That request asked ITD to study the need for a centralized GIS hosting service (GIS hub) for North Dakota state agencies and their partners. The GIS hub would provide a means of sharing the GIS information now being stored locally at each agency.

The CIO agreed that GIS is an important technology for state government and that ITD should take a leading role in GIS. The search for a consulting firm to advise ITD resulted in selection of Convergent Group from Denver, Colorado.

The Convergent Group's first task was to do an preliminary review of GIS in state government. The preliminary review was conducted by interviewing several state agencies that do GIS. The agencies interviewed were: Game and Fish; Parks and Recreation, Water Commission, Economic Development and Finance, Department of Health, Department of Transportation, and Geologic Survey.

The preliminary review results indicated agency agreement on the following:

• GIS is important to state government,
• Declining budgets make GIS a hard sell
• Hiring and retaining GIS talent is difficult
• Agencies would like to do more cost sharing,
• GIS focus needs to be toward web-enabling GIS information.

The preliminary review identified differences among the various agencies in the following areas:

• Data Models
• Symbology
• Platforms
• Accuracy

The hard facts are:

• Most agencies cannot justify GIS initiatives alone
• GIS actions need to be focused by business case
• The business case is tight and it cannot be based solely on elimination of redundancy/cost sharing
• For GIS to be successful state government needs more funding.

Based on the preliminary review, ITD decided to retain the Convergent Group to do a more comprehensive study of GIS in North Dakota State government. That report was started in March 2000 with completion in early April 2000. Please see the Convergent Report (660kb pdf).

On March 8, 2000, ITD hosted a GIS informational session. The Convergent Group presented general and technical GIS information as well as a summary of their findings to-date. ITD stated their commitment to the GIS initiative at that session. Please see the Convergent Workshop (12.9Mb Powerpoint)

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