Metro's GIS Enterprise Platform Renovation

Metro has played a critical and renowned role in integrating and distributing geospatial data from the greater Portland area for many years. The planning agency’s Regional Land Information System (RLIS) program has long been admired as a model for how local government data creation and maintenance activities may be coordinated in support of regional planning and analysis needs.
Metro recently engaged the Gartrell Group to help re-architect and modernize their enterprise GIS platform and related processes for providing and distributing spatial data to their stakeholder community. Consulting services included:

• Performing a needs assessment with internal and external stakeholders to identify and prioritize key platform goals and requirements
• Refining a project plan and solution architecture based on findings from the needs assessment
• Developing and implementing the new GIS data access and distribution platform according to the architectural design

The RLIS Discovery website, providing subscriber access to web services and downloadable datasets, is among the outcomes of this engagement.

Metro likes our work!

We just finished up with an all staff meeting.  We demoed a bunch of the new services and everything worked flawlessly and performed great.  So far the feed back has been overwhelmingly positive. This is where we have been headed for a long time.  It was years ago we started envisioning this type of architecture and it is coming to life.  A large part of where we are is the work and assistance provided by you and your team.  Thank you!— Steve Erickson, Senior GIS Analyst, METRO

Mobile GIS for Transportation

Mobility is a fundamental and pervasive need among departments of transportation, yet developing sound and comprehensive programs for identifying, assessing, and implementing suitable technologies to support mobile workers is still a to-do list item for many organizations.  Rapid changes in technology, variety in usage needs and positional accuracy requirements, and a bewildering number of potential mobile devices are among the challenges which have stalled progress in this area.
The Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) recently engaged the Gartrell Group to help devise a strategy to better equip their mobile workforce and to more systematically and proactively assess, assimilate, and leverage emerging mobile capabilities as an agency.  This Mobile GIS Needs Assessment project involved:

• Performing a needs assessment involving mobility stakeholders throughout the agency.
• Reviewing the application of mobile technologies among peer agencies and other organizations with similar practice areas
• Segmenting mobile technology users and potential users based on affinities in their intended usage, positional accuracy requirements, technical proficiency, form factor preferences, and other workflow details
• Reviewing relevant case studies
• Identifying and matching promising mobile technologies to leading use cases / use case categories which emerged in the needs assessment.
• Developing detailed findings and recommendations.
• Providing follow-on guidance in the design and implementation of an ongoing Mobile GIS Research & Development initiative focused on identifying, assessing, and integrating mobile tools and techniques to continually enhance the mobility and informational capabilities of the DOT.