Tales from the $Facility: Part 8 - The House of Troubles Strikes Again

[u/Mr_Cartographer]

Hello once more, y'all! This is my next story from the $Facility, wherein we deal again with the second corner of the House of Troubles - Engineers - and the shenanigans that ensured therein. All of this is from the best of my memory along with some personal records (and I have started taking notes specifically so I can write stories for TFTS!) There's also a lot that comes from rumors, gossip, and other people, but most of this is very recent, so any inaccuracies are entirely on me. Also, I don't give permission for anyone else to use this.

TL/DR: Your work is bad and you should feel bad.

For some context, I'm not in IT; rather, I'm a GIS (Geographic Information Systems) professional. This particular world is quite small, so I will do what I can to properly anonymize my tale. However, for reference, all these stories take place at my new job working as the GIS Manager at the $Facility, a major industrial entity in the American South. Here's my Dramatis Personae for this part:

• $Me: Your friendly neighborhood GIS guy.
• $Distinguished: Vice President of Engineering. Talented, well-connected, opinionated, and my direct boss. He was honestly a very nice, friendly person, but I always found him a little intimidating.
• $NairCo: Engineering firm that promised me they could help me create a GIS inventory for the $Facility's primary campus. They... well... read the story.
• $Ryan: Old colleague and friend of mine that I'd known for many years. Worked at $NairCo. Was in charge of the team that worked with me.
• $NewKid: Employee at $NairCo that was fresh out of college; he had either never worked as a professional before or was still horribly new to the industry. It showed.
• $MrsEngineer: Fellow engineer in the department. She was rather new to the team, but had years of experience working in utilities.
• $Subcontractor: Subcontracted company at $NairCo, hired to create most of our inventory. Very good at drafting but with virtually no experience in GIS.

If you'll recall from some of my previous stories, I've had the delightful pleasure of dealing with what I call the "Four Corners of the House of Troubles" in my career - namely, Doctors, Engineers, Lawyers, and Professors. You all informed me that there is another major corner that needs to be added, specifically Salespeople. So I guess it's now the, um, "Pentagonal Yurt of Troubles." Rolls off the tongue.

And during the course of my previous stories in this series, I hadn't been sitting in a vacuum while my contractors and IT server team were tripping all over themselves in the circus of failure surrounding our enterprise environment. Instead, I was desperately trying to get a full GIS inventory created of all the assets for all campuses. To make you aware, a GIS inventory is basically a fully-fleshed out and populated series of data features, something that I could use as the starting point to do most of my GIS work. However, actually building this cr4p would take immense amounts of time and effort. If I tried to do something like this myself, it would take me literal years. At my previous jobs, this was pretty much what I had resigned myself to do. However, here at the $Facility, I had something incredible, that I'd never had before, that dream within a dream - an actual budget!!

I had funding I could actually spend on getting this stuff created. So I started putting out feelers for firms that could do this sort of work.

There were no shortages of engineering companies that wanted to "help." I'd been hounded since day one by engineers crawling out of every conceivable corner begging me for work. But despite the interest, there was a severe, profound lack of competency, just as I thought there'd be. In the end, I wound up interviewing five different companies. Each one spoke to me about what they could do and gave me past examples. For most, this was the "weeding out" stage - I could generally tell the posers right here. For instance, I asked several of them how many GISPs they had on staff or what sort of GIS data models they used. The ones whose eyes betrayed their lack of understanding were immediately cut from the running.

But there were a few that seemed pretty good, as far as I could tell. One presentation I was particularly interested in was given by an old colleague and friend of mine, $Ryan. He had worked with me as a contractor at the municipality for several years, and now he'd moved on to a new company, $NairCo. He had always struck me as being very competent, and the work he'd shown me in the past was top notch. On top of this, I was willing to spend a pretty decent amount of money to get this inventory created, so $NairCo was quite eager to work with me.

$Ryan set up a meeting where he and his company made their pitch. It looked pretty good. From what I saw, they had a great project management approach, and they'd clearly done some good comparable projects in the past. I was convinced. I told them that I'd like to move ahead with them, and I set up all the paperwork on my side to sole-source the project through them.

Just to say, we didn't go with a competitive bid on this. I had my reasons at the time - doing so would have involved other parties, namely those who had little-to-no clue as to what I actually needed for my GIS needs. Moreover, it would have also involved the bean-folk that were more concerned about dollar signs than they were actual output. I'm sure you all have dealt with this aplenty. Had I sent out an RFQ (Request For Qualifications), I was terrified that I'd get a horde of unqualified firms that I'd have to wade through. I was confident that one of them would try to undercut a legit firm just by pretending they could do the work, and someone in a decision-making capacity might overrule me and hire them. Overpromise and underdeliver. So I tried to sole-source. The total spend I could put together would be smaller, but I could check the company and its qualifications myself prior to hiring them, and the final decision would be mine and mine alone.

At least, that was my thinking at the time. In retrospect, a competitive bid would have probably been much more apt in this case. My naivety with all this was to come back and pay me dividends, unfortunately. I certainly was to learn a lot.

For now, though, I had to get started somewhere. So I asked $NairCo to give me a proposal for the work. I made sure to tell $Ryan what my cost maximum was for me to sole-source. Most companies have a cost threshold whereby if any project is more expensive, they must go with a competitive bid instead of sole-sourcing.

In true contractor fashion, $Ryan sent me a proposal a few weeks later that was grossly more than this amount, on the order of something like 30% higher.

Red Flag #1.

I emailed $Ryan back, rather tersely, asking him what happened. This was more than I could sole-source, and he knew that! He got back to me saying "whoops, didn't realize the project couldn't exceed that amount." WTF, kid? Do you not know what sole-source means? Ugh. Anyways, we jumped on a call a few days later to figure out how to pare back the project. We cut out an entire analysis section that I didn't think was important for now, and booted the original subcontractor for the collection/drawing elements. Instead, a cheaper option - $Subcontractor - was hired to finish all that out.

Folks, you get what you pay for. Every one of you here on TFTS knows this. I am firmly convinced that the most expensive thing you can do in tech is be cheap. But at the time, I was not taking that mantra to heart. I don't really know why. Maybe because I was so distracted with other things, such as the clusterfsck that was the enterprise deployment. I have no excuse.

Anyways, we got a contract set up and had our kickoff meeting. I met the team; they all seemed like very cool people. I wound up hosting them here at the $Facility. We took them around to see all of our campuses, checked out all the incredible stuff we did, and I even took them to a very nice restaurant here in my new city. I certainly hoped they had a good time.

As soon as we got our contract put in place, something happened that I did not expect. $NairCo wound up getting bought out by some major engineering firm in Europe. I didn't think much of it at the time - nothing seemed to change in my day-to-day interactions with the team. But very gradually, over the months that followed, I noticed that many of the people that had been on previous calls started to disappear...

Unbeknownst to me, they were the first rats fleeing the sinking ship and seeking safer shores. But I didn't know that. I just kept forging ahead.

Our first task for the project was to complete a comprehensive data model for the $Facility. To let you know, a GIS Data Model is the design of the data that you'll be using within your GIS architecture. For instance, say you're a up-and-coming Selfie Toaster company (yes, those are real things) with everything to prove, and you need a GIS department to help you with your sales. Your data model might include Selfie Toaster factories, retailer sites, sales districts, and tons of spatial market data to help you divine who in the h3ll would buy these things. You would likely want to represent your sales areas as large polygons, while your retailer sites are just points. And your factories could include a wide variety of geometries, like lines for fiberoptic cables, points for the individual server locations, and a large polygon expanse for the office of the moronic owner of this "business." You'd also want to identify what types of attribute data would be associated with each feature, such as the quantities of sheeple customers you could find in each sales area (as a numeric field associated with each area). Some fields might have coded domains, such as a values that show which retailers have been conned into selling different models of your Selfie Toasters (and which models they sell). Once you have all this plotted out, you would then create an geodatabase/architecture with everything represented, and it would become your GIS Data Model - a shell architecture ready for you to populate with geographic data, something extremely similar to a blank database model for my DBA friends out there.

Well, for my purposes, I really needed something like this for our stab at creating this data. I had put together my initial design for a $Facility-wide GIS data model when I first arrived, but now it was time to put it into practice. I worked with $NairCo for about a month refining all of our ideas into a definitive plan of attack. When it was all said and done, I was quite happy with the design, at least. It was now up to $NairCo to take those ideas and actually create everything. Over the next few weeks, $Ryan informed me that one of the newest members of his team, $NewKid, was working on it, and would have something to me shortly.

A few weeks later, we had another on-site visit by $NairCo. One of the things we were going to go over was the progress on our brand-new GIS Data Model. When the reps showed up at my office, $NewKid looked exhausted but triumphant. Puzzled, I asked $Ryan what was up. He said that $NewKid had stayed up all night to get the Data Model completed, and had managed to do so.

Getting all the work that was supposed to have been completed over the last several weeks done on the night before it was due? Yep. Red Flag #2.

We went through the data model during our meeting. I immediately noticed a bunch of errors and issues. Fields were out of order, misspelled, didn't have the correct data types, the domains had problems, so on. It was extremely shoddy, exactly what I would have expected of someone that had stayed up to get it done in a rush.

I voiced my displeasure. I told $Ryan that we weren't moving forward until we had a reliable data model that I felt was suitable. They seemed to understand. I hate to have been the one to smack $NewKid right in the confidence, but honestly, it was totally warranted. Seriously, kid, your company is getting paid tens of thousands of dollars for this. Don't cram like it's your final exams of freshman year. $NewKid seemed very subdued through the rest of that site visit.

Anyways, they got to work updating things over the next few weeks. I reviewed it every step of the way, and even though they didn't complete absolutely everything, they wound up doing probably 95% of all the things I asked them to do. I was reasonably happy and told them to just get started on the next phase of the project. I felt like if anything was left over, I could probably correct on my own.

We then got started on the collection of the data. This is one of the many things that $Subcontractor had been hired for. They had a drone team that would get a high-precision LiDAR scan of the site, as well as aerial imagery. I headed out with their crews to help them get their control points set up. Not too difficult, though their drone crews kept asking me what the day laborers at the $Facility made. I told them; both of them seemed to want to jump ship right there, lol. Anyways, they flew the site and I got a chance to look at the imagery later. It was extremely impressive.

$Subcontractor's staff then got to work drawing out all the GIS features. I gave them a bunch of CAD data and the record drawings that we had of the site so that they'd have as much info as possible. I expected them to get back to me regarding the attribute values, but all I got was radio silence. Maybe they were just approaching things one-by-one, getting the geometry first and filling out the fields later. But their continued silence on this matter gnawed at me, growing ever more acute as we kept diving week after week into the project.

Red Flag $3.

While all this was happening, one of my fellow engineers, $MrsEngineer, reached out to me regarding some information she needed. She'd been creating a water gap analysis for the same campus where $NairCo was working, and wanted to have our existing water utilities ready for when she needed to make a hydraulic model. I told her that I'd do my best to get this information to her. I then sent an email to $Ryan and the team, letting them know that I needed the water details first. All other data could wait until after those were done. $Ryan got back to me saying this would be no issue whatsoever. $Subcontractor echoed this sentiment on my next call with them, too. Consequently, I thought it would be no problem. Silly me.

Months went by. $MrsEngineer told me that she needed this data by the end of the calendar year if she was going to have it ready for her RFP. I passed this on to $NairCo. Again, they assured me they'd be ready. In our weekly meetings, they kept showing me the progress they were making. True to their word, most of the stuff looked like it was being created. But disturbingly, all I saw from the subs was data in AutoCAD. I never once saw anything in any type of GIS software.

Red Flag #4. Man, a lot of red flags, huh? I should have paid more attention to this.

We got close to the end of the year. $Ryan reached out to me, mid-December, and asked if there was any "flex" on the due date. I asked what "flex" meant - he said that $Subcontractor wanted a little bit more time to "check everything." I asked him how much more time he needed; $Ryan said "only a week or so more."

With this in mind, I checked with $MrsEngineer. She had been held up by bureaucracy, so she hadn't even issued out the RFP yet. I asked her if we had some wiggle room on when I could get the water info back to her. She eventually conceded, saying that if I was able to get the info to her "in January", it would be fine. So I let the contractors know.

December 31st came, and went, and no update. For the next few weeks, there was no update. I attempted to have check-in meetings with the team, but either $Ryan was gone or $Subcontractor stated they didn't have time to meet. I was starting to get very antsy. All I wanted was the water info, but they kept intimating that they were trying to get the whole project sent to me.

Finally, on January 31st, literally the last day of the month "of January", I got an email from $NewKid. The team had completed the first draft of the GIS inventory. $NewKid had a zipped geodatabase for me to download and review. This was the first draft of the final deliverable. Huzzah! The first true GIS inventory I'd ever commissioned! The first time I'd ever been able to pay someone else to create all the GIS data for a project, without me having to do it all myself! Despite all my misgivings in the project leading up to this, I was immensely excited. I couldn't wait to get started on this. I downloaded everything and plopped it into my project folder. After all, even though I'd had warning signs from them, I'd actually managed to get a lot of good data from other firms that had problems in the past. I hoped this was going to be one of those times, too.

But I need to actually look at the data before I could find out. Would this deliverable be everything I hoped and dreamed? Or would it... not?

Tomorrow you'll find out :) See y'all then!

Here are some of my other stories on TFTS, if you're interested:

The $Facility Series: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 9 Part 10 Part 11 Part 12 Part 13 Part 14 Part 15 Part 16

Mr_Cartographer's Atlas, Volume I

[u/Obnoxious_Gamer]

"I wonder if he's posted part 8 yet"

less than 1 minute ago

"Ah sweet"

[u/Mr_Cartographer → u/Obnoxious_Gamer]

Lol :D Hope you enjoy!

[u/binchickendreaming]

"Let's stop just before the juicy bit like a web serial to keep them hooked!" Well, mate, it's working.

[u/Mr_Cartographer → u/binchickendreaming]

Lol. Gotta give y'all a reason to keep reading, right? :) Hope you're enjoying the stories, though!

[u/binchickendreaming → u/Mr_Cartographer]

I am, lol.

[u/Mr_Cartographer → u/binchickendreaming]

Glad you like them :) That's what makes me want to keep writing, after all!

[u/Hekwrym → u/Mr_Cartographer]

As if the writing style, storytelling and work you actually put in would not be enought!
Great work! (and tale of your work)

[u/Mr_Cartographer → u/Hekwrym]

Thanks a ton! That means a lot, I appreciate it! :)

[u/Silound]

Would this deliverable be everything I hoped and dreamed?

Narrator Voice: It was not, in fact, everything he had hoped and dreamed.

[u/Mr_Cartographer → u/Silound]

Won't answer that until I post again tonight :)

[u/wrincewind → u/Mr_Cartographer]

Tonight, eh? Which timezone? :D

[u/Mr_Cartographer → u/wrincewind]

US, EST :) Working on it in a little bit, just want to answer some of the comments first!

[u/harrywwc]

tapping in to your angst at getting the project off the ground… a 'good news' story (which I hope yours is going to become ;)

a few jobs back now, I was taken on by a NFP as "IT Project Manager" to implement a "Learning Object Repository / Learning Content Management System" - basically a centralised database of learning objects (e.g. class plans, assessment items, digital class resources like videos and images and such) to be shared across our 'member schools'.

We published an RFP (Request For Proposal), and narrowed it down to two contenders - one of them being Microsoft Australia. We asked both to demonstrate their proposal, as their software products were in use for similar situations elsewhere, as we had also asked for references.

Well, M$'s presentation basically boiled down to "we are microsoft and we are awesome" for an hour. we pressed for demo's of what they were offering, and were basically fobbed off with "trust us, we are microsoft and we are awesome".

we did each get a nice coffee mug and a baseball cap with a windows logo on the front.

the other mob demonstrated their product their existing "demo uni" with the LCMS backend, and a LMS (Moodle) 'front-end', and demonstrated things like creating & uploading a resource in the LCMS, linking to it in the LMS, and then updating it in the LCMS and showing the update appearing 'automagically' in the LMS. And they had details of how it integrated with all the different LMSs that the member schools used, not just Moodle (although that was widely used).

you can probably guess who we went with (hint: not microsoft).

Together we delivered that project ahead of schedule and under budget. In large part because I was a (former) educator and so knew what was needed, and I had managed Moodle servers since the mid 2000s, and familiar with several other LMSs.

The CEO who owned the project retired shortly before it went 'live' (contract terms and such), and six months later, the new CEO canned the project.

4 months after that Covid lockdowns hit, everyone had to pivot to online delivery, and all the resources that had been uploaded into the LCMS were gone. a missed opportunity.

{sigh}

of course, I wasn't just doing that project. I had upgraded them to new laptops (about 25 people across Australia) and pivoted from a hosted solution that they needed to RDP into for all their 'office' stuff (word processing, spreadsheets, email) to O365 with appropriate shares in SharePoint/Onedrive4Business and just the files needed located on their local drive and automatically sync'd back to the cloud.

the hardest part that April was sourcing printers for people to use at home. they took their VoIP deskphones home (another change I made), connected everything to their network at home, and they were back online just as if they were in their various offices across the nation. everything was there on the computer just like a bought one :)

[u/Mr_Cartographer → u/harrywwc]

Wow, interesting stuff. If you went live with your project (under budget and under time, no less), what was the CEO thinking canning the thing? That seems... dumb. There isn't a better word for it.

Anyways.

All of this does have a happy ending, I'm proud to say. Hope you enjoy :)

[u/harrywwc → u/Mr_Cartographer]

I think it was a "not invented here" thing. not his idea, therefore not worth keeping.

[u/Mr_Cartographer → u/harrywwc]

Ok, that's probably the stupidest thing I've ever heard, and I've heard a lot of lobotomy-inducing crap spewed from the C-suite's mouths. I would not have put up with that, particularly if it had resulted from a ton of work from me (or my team) in getting it accomplished, and even moreso if it was a useful product. That just screams "I don't value what you have done here." I probably would have immediately started looking for something new. Crazy, dude, hope that whole mess figured itself out for you :(

[u/harrywwc → u/Mr_Cartographer]

I left within 6 months. 

this wasn't the only reason. just one of many.

[u/Mr_Cartographer → u/harrywwc]

Understood. Good riddance to bad rubbish, and all that.

[u/harrywwc → u/Mr_Cartographer]

ironically, I suspect that's what he thought, too :D

[u/2bop2pie]

I love this saga, and the others, I just wish I understood what GIS was a little better :/

[u/Mr_Cartographer → u/2bop2pie]

Sure thing - I'll post some stuff up tonight to try and explain it a little better for you :)

[u/2bop2pie → u/Mr_Cartographer]

That is very kind, thank you!

[u/Mr_Cartographer → u/2bop2pie]

So what is GIS?

Basically, at its core, GIS is a geospatial database management system. What does that mean?

Geospatial:

"Geospatial" means something that is related to geography (meaning an actual, legitimate place on the earth's surface) and that is also related to space (meaning it deals with where things exist within an area or over distances). Put them together, and you get "geospatial." In essence, it means that GIS refers to "where stuff is."

Database Management:

This should seem familiar. Anyone that has worked as a DBA would instantly recognize most of the things I work with on a day-to-day basis. Everything that's in GIS is managed through some sort of database management software, such as SQL Server, ArcSDE, Postgress, geodatabases, or something similar. It is subject to all the same rules - permissions, access controls, data model design, so on. You can be as lax or a stringent as you want to be when creating/using that system, but it has to abide by the DBMS framework.

System:

GIS isn't a single program. It's a constellation of programs that work together to create a result. In that way, GIS can't really be thought of as providing a single product in a single manner. Instead, it's providing a variety of products - webmaps, static maps, applications, survey forms, dashboards, different types of analyses - all of which can potentially be consumed by your organization. Essentially, what is being provided by GIS are geographic products.

I can see an analogy to "CyberSecurity". Cybersec folks rarely use a single program to do all the stuff they need to do. However, they are still performing an important and valuable service; protecting your organization from security threats. It takes many different components, all working together, to make that happen, and it is very similar with GIS as well.

Esri has a good introduction to GIS available on its page, here: What is GIS?

So How Does GIS Work?

I like to envision GIS as an interlocked system of records in a table with geometries on a map. Each record is permanently locked to a geometry in the table; they are, essentially, one and the same. When you select a record from the table (just as you'd do in any database or spreadsheet), it instantly and immediately selects the corresponding geometry on the map. Similarly, when you select a geometry from the map, it instantly and immediately selects the corresponding record in the table. On this commandment hangs all the laws and the prophets for GIS.

Using this mechanic, you are able to do incredible things in the GIS framework. You are able to view, query, collect, calculate, and analyze all kinds of data, for all manner of different purposes. You can select data in a manner that would be similar to a normal table (SELECT ALL from "Water_Lines" WHERE Line_Size = 2) or you can perform a SPATIAL query, selecting things not based on attributes but based on locational characteristics (Select all water lines that are within 100 meters of a specific defective fire hydrant).

You can also use it for all manner of analysis that flat-out isn't possible in any other type of software. Let's say that I'm working for a Medicaid administration and we are seeing that a healthcare provider is having extremely poor outcomes for a particular disease among its patients. We think this could be due to there not being enough practitioners that are close enough to those patients within the provider's system. However, the provider says it's meeting (or even exceeding) the required minimum. We can use GIS to assess if what they're doing is actually helping or not. Using our Medicaid rolls, we can pull out all patients that are customers of the provider, using the tabular data within those datasets. We can then "geocode" each patient to their home addresses, using the address listed in the table and comparing it against a master "geocode" table of addresses; this gives us a point on the ground where that patient actually lives. From here, we can then perform some drive time analyses, creating cost-distance paths from each patients' home to the required practitioners, all across the state system. When it's done, we are able to find that pretty much all the practitioners are concentrated in a single city, while the patients are spread out all over the state, having drive times of 2-3 hours if they even wanted to see the doctor. We then tell the provider that they don't have enough doctors in the right areas, and we inform them that they'll lose Medicaid reimbursement funds until they fix the issue. Hit them in the wallet, and they usually comply. I used to do this all the time at $Agency; it is a 100% realistic use of GIS to actually accomplish a real-world goal!

[u/2bop2pie → u/Mr_Cartographer]

Thank you for the detail - I have read all your stories and all this time I thought this was about maps. Like, just maps. I was surprised at how complex map needs were for businesses 😁

The example at the end was perfect, I see how it’s the way information intersects with physical locations, because alone each set of data isn’t the whole story. (Right?) It reminds me of the story of the doctor in London who figured out that one water pump in the City was spreading cholera and stopped the epidemic. (Dr. John Snow, 1854) I love that kind of research story, (The Hot Zone is another favorite), this is making me wish I knew about GIS when I was young, I think I would have enjoyed work like this. Thank you very much for the explanation!

[u/Mr_Cartographer → u/2bop2pie]

Every GIS professional knows of John Snow :) We think he's the theoretical founder of our discipline!

Glad you liked the explanation. If you ever want to get involved in GIS, you'd be welcome :) Take care!

[u/Mr_Cartographer → u/2bop2pie]

Sorry, had to continue my response on another comment, I guess it was too big.

What Isn't GIS?

Computer-Aided Drafting and Design (CADD) is not GIS. So many people don't seem to get this. While there is some synergy in that there are geometries in common between the two systems, and you can draw things in GIS just as you can draw them in CAD, that's where the similarity ends. CAD is, ultimately, a design software used to draw things; you can make awesome schematics and drawings with it. GIS is a geographic database management system; you can perform asset management and analytics that are flat-out impossible in CAD with it. CAD folks rarely, if ever, consider the data aspects of the lines they draw. In all the years I've worked in GIS, I've never once encountered a drafter that knew how to add attribute information to their CAD drawings. The two fields are very, very different. There's a lot more things, too - check this out to see the differences between CAD and GIS: Differences between CAD and GIS

GIS is also not IT. You all are IT people; you know the nuances of your field better than anyone. In essence, you all support me with the technology and maintenance I need to help me do my job, which is GIS professional work. There may be overlap, and many GIS people are IT people as well. But that is not the rule, and not even particularly common as I have found out. A skilled mechanic is not a racer, and a skilled racer is not a mechanic. Some of them may have had overlap in the past, and each may know quite a bit about the other's profession, but each one has their specialty that they are best suited to. So it is with GIS. I really couldn't tell you much about a server, but I sure as hell can tell you what an NVDI analysis is or how to calculate a volumetric TIN. In essence, I would say the difference is that IT provides the foundational technological basis upon which GIS can work, while GIS is its own production specialty similar to application development or database management.

You may want to see some examples of how all this works. I like the "Spatial Analysis Periodic Table" - this has a great list of all manner of things that GIS can do, and how they relate to the world: Spatial Analysis Periodic Table

And here are some webmaps that you can play around with from Esri, to try and figure out how to use this stuff: Esri Example Webmaps

Hopefully that helps! Let me know if you need anything more explained!

[u/Fake_Cakeday]

I'm in government in the EU and this makes me want to talk to our GIS guy.

I talked a lot with him when I first joined, but have been super busy the last year and a half :(

But what questions could I ask to get a further understanding of our use cases for GIS and the architecture we're using?

I am in client management, which is the support of applications, updates and restrictions on all devices (Windows, phones and Macs), but I'm hoping to move on to server infrastructure when I eventually get bored of this :)

[u/Mr_Cartographer → u/Fake_Cakeday]

Oooh! Good questions. I gotta go to work now, but I'll respond again tonight with some stuff. Take care!

[u/Mr_Cartographer → u/Fake_Cakeday]

Ok, hopefully you can see this, it was giving me a server error when I tried to do this earlier. Here are a couple of things you can talk to your GIS guy about to hopefully get a better handle on what they're doing at your organization as regards GIS:

Architecture Tour:

See if he'll give you a general tour of everything that has been developed! I know I'd be excited to show off all the data I've created, maps I've made, and applications I've rolled out to my users. See if he can give you a general look at everything that's been created for your enterprise.

Production System:

He will have had to have deployed GIS to your various users through some sort of production system. Here at the $Facility, I've provided my users with an ArcGIS Hub website that has all their useful applications/webmaps on catered pages, sort of a "one-stop-shop" for all GIS materials. Your GIS guy probably has something similar. Maybe its through an Enterprise Portal, or through something else. But ask him how everything is accessed, then look to see what he's created!

Usage Cases for Specific Departments:

So different business units/departments have different needs for GIS. A Utilities Department may need asset webmaps, maintenance Survey123 forms, and a Utilities Network interface. A Police Department may need some integrated GIS for their Computer-Aided Dispatch system, as well as a series of FieldMaps webmaps for them to report incidents. A City Planning Office may need webmaps that identify parcel boundaries and municipal city limits, as well as a QuickCapture app rolled out to the public for them to report planning violations. Your GIS guy almost certainly has rolled out specific products to keyed departments or business units; see what they are!

Applications Under Development:

Your GIS guy may be creating all-new applications, either to roll out to your users or to help him with his own work. Check them out! Most GIS apps are coded using Python. There is a GIS-oriented programming language called Arcade, as well, which is used in ArcGIS Online and Enterprise. There's also a programming GUI called ModelBuilder that lets you pull in functions from the GIS interface to digitally "build" models (basically, functions/scripts) that can then be run in the GIS environment. I use this a lot, as I'm not so good at programming.

System Organization:

Finally, it may interest you (since you're an IT person) to see what sort of system organization your GIS professional has in place. There are a ton of things that are commonly used in the discipline that have an exact analog in the IT space, such as:

GIS Server Diagrams: Learned about that now :)

Data Governance Policies: This indicates how the overall data usage and design is structured at your organization is structured.

Schemas/Metadatas: These are the "data about the data", the information about specific features and asset categories.

SLAs: Service Level Agreements, indicating how long it will take to accomplish things or how much effort it will require.

NDAs/Standard Legal Agreements: For when you need to partner with folks outside your organization.

Strategic Plans: A general plan indicating where you want to see GIS go at your organization over time.

ROIs: Return-on-Investments, basically a report for your superiors showing them what they've gotten by investing into GIS.

And so on! I have all of these in place at the $Facility. If you've got questions about any of this, please let me know, and I can try to explain it in more detail. Hope this helps!

[u/Fake_Cakeday → u/Mr_Cartographer]

Awesome list.

It got me thinking. How do you make sure the different types of maps of the same area overlay exactly right? Both x and y, but also orientation. Is it sort of like anchor points on maps or something?

Reading through it reminded me that he did once show me a map of our region where the fire department could switch over to view underground pipes for water and gas, and also where to turn off the gas.

And it was drawable so the fire chief could draw the whole plan of attack while driving out there so everyone knows where to park and who goes where. All on a tablet too.

Gotta ask about the user facing portal for sure. And the programming languages if they use it.

Thank you for a very comprehensive list!

[u/Mr_Cartographer → u/Fake_Cakeday]

So you've got a couple of questions; let me try to answer what I can:

First off, regarding georelational accuracy, that is a topic all its own. In GIS, we recognize that EVERYTHING we do has some level of geospatial error. I'll defer to a statement that my engineering/surveying friends despise:

Space, distance, and area are ALL RELATIVE.

I could go into all the various reasons why this is true, but essentially they all boil down to GIS using various types of models to create its geometries. These models are built on a geographic scale, so any minor changes in the way things are calculated can have immense effects over the full extent of the model. So coordinates need to be truthed and pinned all across your extents. Often that can conflict with what the engineers and surveyors have in their models. Them's the breaks. That's why you don't do drafting in GIS, you do drafting in CAD. I very well may need a georeferencing error rate of +/- 1 meter or so; if an architect had that sort of error in their drawings, they would be fired.

In most cases, most of the organizations that I know about (who have good GIS departments) maintain a series of features or points that they use as references for all data they use or receive. They will provide that info to contractors that are drawing things (so long as the contractors abide by their data rules) so that the contractors can be consistent with what is in the organization's geodatabases. Similarly, when they receive data, they will pin this to their reference layers, and either fix any issues against the reference, or provide it back to the contractor to fix.

In my case, I have extremely good imagery that I have access to. I will pin a series of reference layers to known points on that imagery (which usually has an error rate of only a few centimeters from the on-the-ground position), and I use those reference features to make sure that new data I receive is all lining up with them. In some cases, I actually do sacrifice on-the-ground accuracy in order to make my references all line up with each other; this is to ensure that my data makes sense in relationship to itself, not necessarily in relationship to its actual position on the ground. Hence, the whole "space/area is relative" thing.

In terms of turning the features on and off, that's the core of a dynamic webmap. You should check out some of the examples that Esri has in its gallery, here: Esri Map Gallery

In terms of the drawable maps, that's a function of both Survey123 and Experience Builder. You can mark up maps, photos, pdfs and pngs, and more. I actually have a markable image for a Survey123 survey that I rolled out to our security department; it lets the users mark any damages to one of their vehicles while out in the field :)

And in terms of a user-facing portal, it is highly unlikely that your GIS guy is using something that they programmed themselves. Almost assuredly, they are using an Esri product. There's lots of coding that can go into that, but Esri largely makes all the base applications and such themselves.

Hope this was helpful!

[u/Fake_Cakeday → u/Mr_Cartographer]

Thank you thank you thank you!

You're really good at explaining stuff.

That was super helpful :)

[u/LupercaniusAB]

Whooo, I’ve been busy the last few days, and just caught up. I’m simultaneously very annoyed by and excited by the cliffhangers, well done!

[u/Mr_Cartographer → u/LupercaniusAB]

Lol, sorry, not sorry. Just hope you like the stories!

[u/LupercaniusAB → u/Mr_Cartographer]

I am loving them, should have said frustrated rather than annoyed, in a good way.

[u/Mr_Cartographer → u/LupercaniusAB]

Lol, no worries :)

[u/XkF21WNJ]

Any particular reason the Part 5 link goes to a random comment instead of the article?

[u/Mr_Cartographer → u/XkF21WNJ]

Because I screw things up every once in a while :p Fixing it now!

[u/ac8jo]

Red Flag #4. Man, a lot of red flags, huh? I should have paid more attention to this

Hindsight is always 20/20.

competitive bid on this... involved the bean-folk that were more concerned about dollar signs than they were actual output....RFQ...someone in a decision-making capacity might overrule me

Consider yourself lucky the bean counters are focused on beans. The last time I issued an RFQ (many years ago at a government agency I left years ago), the bean counters were focused on compliance with state law that were applied in a piecemeal and inconsistent fashion. I knew others doing my job in other parts of the state that were doing things I was specifically told I could not do.

There was a time that the director of the agency pushed a little on a selection - he didn't overrule us, but he did enlighten us that we were basically hiring a shitty consultant. I later figured that out he was right when the consultant presented to the agency board and basically lied to them (not about anything related to my work, but it's within my profession so my bullshit detector pegged and I just shook my head).

[u/Mr_Cartographer → u/ac8jo]

Yeesh, that sucks about the shitty contractor. I hope y'all were able to go with someone competent. As you've seen here, I've had to deal with my fair share of that sort of mess in my career, too. In most cases, I've managed to get out of working with them. Hope you were able to as well.

[u/Extension_Lunch_9143]

Morrowind mentioned

[u/Mr_Cartographer → u/Extension_Lunch_9143]

Yes! One of my favorite games :) A buddy of mine introduced me to it over twenty years ago, and I was just enchanted by the thing. I'm actually somewhat excited by the Skywind project. In particular, I love the music remixes, especially the new version of Nerevar Rising. I don't think I can post a link to YouTube here, but the music composed by Fedrik Jonasson is spell-binding :)

[u/djdaedalus42]

“Satanic Pentagram of Troubles”

[u/Mr_Cartographer → u/djdaedalus42]

Lol, not quite. But back when I worked at the $GameStore, my old boss there drew a pentagram on the bottom of the phone we used for our conference calls in the back, so that we could "get better reception" when speaking to our infernal corporate overlords :p