Portland, Oregon’s Corporate GIS office (CGIS) is now operating under a new Strategic Plan. Our team had the pleasure of engaging with a broad number of City staff and partners to lead a process of envisioning and articulating how CGIS will deliver geospatial services and boost the City’s location intelligence over the next several years.
The Gartrell Group performed a detailed assessment of CGIS’s staff capabilities, their data and technologies, and their portfolio of services. We also facilitated a series of workshops to invigorate stakeholder discussion, identify current needs and challenges, and to elicit the highest priorities of the users and beneficiaries of Portland’s geospatial tools and data. We used findings from these efforts to craft and refine a plan for how the City may best apply resources for the greatest possible impact.
The adopted plan bridges topics of organizational strategy, data management, and technology management. It expresses a renovated vision and mission for CGIS and outlines how these may be realized through a clear and measurable set of objectives. Importantly, the endeavor of the planning process itself – the workshops, the brainstorming, balloting activities, and collaborative needs discovery – helped to strengthen bonds between the City’s management and stakeholders and to re-open communication channels across department and agency boundaries.
Assisting organizations develop and enhance their location strategy is one of our core services and a keen area of interest among all of our team members. We think the work is important, we enjoy the process, and we take a lot of satisfaction in seeing the acceleration that happens once a customer has spent some time getting (re) acquainted with their location strategy and direction.
We are equipped with a very adaptive toolkit of strategy development know-how, means, and methods, and we can tailor an approach suited to your particular needs and questions. Please contact us if you’d be interested in learning more about how we can help your organization improve location strategy.
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