Strategic Planning for the City of Portland

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.

Increasing Location Intelligence for Mercy Corps

Our team has recently undertaken a rewarding effort to help Mercy Corps improve their location intelligence capabilities for better program monitoring, performance assessment, and situational awareness in areas around the globe where the non-governmental aid organization conducts disaster relief and economic development programs.
In their own words:

“Mercy Corps partners with creative thinkers from the private and public sectors to develop social innovations that transform lives. New technology, business models and creative partnerships provide transformational opportunities for overcoming poverty and despair.”

Our team’s partnership with Mercy Corps has involved implementing a Performance Atlas visualization and interactive mapping system that allows for:

• Review, monitoring, and assessment of key performance indicators
• Field mission planning support
• Integration and assessment of field-collected data
• Collaborative, visual communication among remote project partners and stakeholders.

We are now collaborating with Mercy Corps and members of the Barr and Kellogg Foundation to determine how the Location Intelligence system used for a pilot project in Haiti may be further extended and applied to other programs across the globe.  This is in support of Mercy Corp’s mission to leverage [a] robust global program platform to identify breakthrough ideas, test them in the field, and scale them broadly.”

A mobile update

We’ve noticed that over the past year, the shift from desktop to mobile browsers has been pretty dramatic.
Using our latest analytics (if you run a web site, you need to take a look at the numbers of your users that are coming in via their phones; if you haven’t looked recently, you should look now. I’ll wait…... Impressive, no?) we have found that the vast majority of our users are coming to this site on their mobile phones. And of that, most users are on iPhones (let’s not turn this into an iOS vs Android discussion – I’m just reporting the facts; 75% of our mobile visitors are on iPhones and about 10% are on iPads. The rest are spread out between Android and Blackberry devices).

If you come to our site on a mobile device, you will see our desktop version, but at the bottom of the page, you will see a link that says “Switch To Mobile Version.” Give it a try and let us know what you think. We will be adding new content to the mobile version over the next few weeks. If you are in charge of running your company’s web site, you may want to start thinking about providing your users with a mobile version.