We have the Geospatial technology. More geospatial benefits than ever before! Better, stronger, faster...

Written by Duane Wilkins, Spatial Data Infrastructure Leader, LINZ

Unless you’re Oscar Goldman with a spare six million dollars, gaining support for geospatial projects can be difficult. LINZ is trying to make it a little easier by collating stories, examples and re-usable resources like case studies and diagrams to help explain to non-specialists how using geospatial technology can benefit organisations.

Geospatial practitioners understand the potential of spatially enabling a process, but often struggle to describe or quantify business benefits or process improvements to non-geospatial executives. Geospatial practitioners often underestimate the level of effort required to demonstrate a quantitative benefit for decision makers, it’s not often that a task can be completed in a single afternoon, as much as we’d like!

With the support of organisations that have implemented successful systems or projects, LINZ have been gathering New Zealand examples of how geospatial data, technology and services are creating clear benefits.

We hope this collaborative project will make it easier for all of us to share, describe and raise awareness of the many different ways geospatial information and systems can make a difference.

By providing local, home grown examples for use in business cases and project proposals we hope that this will drive greater investment and increase the use and value generated from geospatial information in New Zealand.

What is a Benefit?

A benefit is a positive change or desirable result or effect from an action, investment or project. A disbenefit is the disadvantage or loss resulting from some activity or some action. Generally, these are described as an increase, a decrease, an improvement, a reduction, bigger, better, faster or stronger.

For example, good address and road network data (navigation) means that we are less likely to get lost, save time and fuel finding a delivery location, resulting in improved customer satisfaction, and an increased cash flow through more parcels delivered, and in less time.

The use of geospatial information leads to a variety of efficiencies, or capacity if the same resources are still devoted to the same work. The application of geospatial data and technologies creates efficiencies, or at least enables the re-use of the same data. Efficiencies result from the use of spatially-enabled tools, by making data easier and faster to read on a map than in spreadsheets and reports.

Savings from the use of geospatial data and capabilities are the difference between a baseline cost (which may be an estimate) for a process that makes no use of geospatial data, and the cost of doing that work using geospatial tools, data and techniques.

The Ten Benefits of Geospatial Information for New Zealand.

We tried a number of ways to slice and dice the data, but after much paralysis of analysis, we opted for a “click bait heading” approach based on ten different general types based on their aspects of similarity.

Here are the ten “categories” we’ve used to group the examples so far:

• Increased efficiency and reduced costs
• Enhanced effectiveness and accuracy
• Increased transparency & improved perception
• Increased interoperability and data exchange
• Greater satisfaction and better understanding of customers and stakeholder needs.
• Improved quality of Products and Services
• Improved Knowledge management and retention
• Accelerated Innovation
• Strengthen Resilience and Reduced Risk
• An Empowered Māori Culture

We’ve also added a section on Benefits Realisation and will be developing further the Return on Investment (ROI) approaches to quantifying these benefits to support business case development for example. We welcome further feedback and there is no reason we cannot add, merge, remove or change these categories either!

An example (pictured above) is the Department of Conservation ‘s (DOC) “Discover the Outdoors” web mapping application.

This application supports increased public access to DOC land, with millions of views per year. It also enables anyone to provide quality assurance feedback on the features mapped and entirely removed the need for DOC’s geospatial team and other staff throughout New Zealand providing simple maps to the public. The app also reduces demand on local DOC Rangers for basic track or hut location information, enabling more of a focused and informed discussion, and links users directly to DOC Hut and Track booking systems. The benefits of this work include: increased public use of DOC land, improved data and information access and management, and reduced overheads. https://maps.doc.govt.nz

Google Maps is a great example of how geographic information is used by millions of people daily, reducing travel time, and offer alternative routes depending on usual traffic at different times of the day, as well as real time updates on traffic information based on anonymised information from smartphone users where a traffic jam or other significant event may have occurred just moments ago. https://google.com/maps

Geospatial data and technologies have the potential to deliver an extraordinary amount of value to New Zealand businesses, local government, central government, Iwi, NGOs and New Zealanders. The effort required to implement a benefits realisation assessment can be small in comparison to the economic, social, cultural and environmental benefits that will result from even a relatively modest geospatial project.

Geospatial means business

Removing key barriers to connecting this information could add a further $500 million a year in productivity benefits and generate an extra $100 million in government revenue. Geospatial information and related technologies form a part of New Zealand’s knowledge infrastructure and enables innovation and better decision-making. Geospatial capability may enhance virtually any aspect of business, including decision-making, asset management, service delivery, new product development, resource allocation, process improvement, and overall cost structure. Both public-sector and private-sector businesses may benefit from the addition of geospatial capabilities. Almost every transaction today is time-stamped, which has provided an added dimension for business analysis. Timestamps have enabled superior forensic investigation (e.g. by exposing the sequence of events), streamlined business processes (e.g. by exposing delays and downtime), and improved decision-making (e.g. by providing richer evidence).

Location-stamping these transactions (and assets, and events etc.) allows for further types of analysis (spatial analysis), which could be combined with time analysis and other forms of business analysis to enable yet-better-informed decisions, yet-more-streamlined business processes, and even new capabilities, products and services.

The intent of this work is to raise decision-makers awareness of the possible benefits and the business benefits to be had by their organisations. For practitioners—project managers, programme managers, change managers, and programme management offices (PMOs)—this resource is intended to support benefits realisation planning.

Another example of geospatial technology reducing duplication is the “Potential Earthquake Prone Building Assessment Form” recently shared by the Thames Coromandel District Council on LinkedIn.

This provides Geospatial Analysts in other local government offices with a running start to use as is, or build on the work already done by Senior Geospatial Analyst, Andrew Hansford. Download the form template for use with Esri ArcGIS Online from: https://tcdc.maps.arcgis.com

Download a copy of The Ten Benefits of Geospatial Information today

We’ve collated examples of the benefits of using geospatial information and grouped them by themes for ease of reference and you can access and use materials from our ongoing collaboration at linz.govt.nz/ benefits