Routing school buses. Tracking work orders. Monitoring facilities and assets. Understanding and engaging with communities. Planning and communicating about school area boundaries. Developing and implementing school policies. Reporting to board members. Tracking equity issues. Analyzing population and demographic trends. Allocating resources. Measuring performance.

Nearly everything beneath the Portland Public School District’s operational umbrella has a spatial component. Over the past several months, our consulting team has had the privilege of working with staff from PPS to explore what a richer set of geospatial tools and capabilities might mean for the District. Our team has facilitated a series of cross-disciplinary needs assessment and strategy development workshops to help PPS evaluate options and articulate a vision for an enterprise geographic information system (GIS). Based on outcomes and findings from these workshops, PPS executives have recently determined to move forward in developing and implementing this new resource for the District.

Providing guidance and helping to elicit and define the geospatial needs, goals and opportunities of diverse stakeholders is a key part of the Gartrell Group’s practice and one we pursue with enthusiasm. We’re firmly of the mind that geospatial technology is unifying by nature, and we delight in helping organizations explore and discover ways that GIS may be used to create new efficiencies and to move beyond silos and jurisdictional firewalls. Please get in touch if you’d like to discuss what an enterprise GIS capability might mean for your organization.