Picture this: you’ve achieved your lifetime goal of becoming a high-ranking government official. People come to you for wisdom and advice regarding the affairs of the community and region with which you are associated. How do you come up with the answers to the questions you’re asked? You could go out firsthand and experience the issue that was described to you and you could formulate a response. Or, you could set up a team of advisors and investigators to look into the issue and report back. Now, those are both responsible and beneficial actions. However, they are a little bit inefficient.
Setting up for success with GIS data
What if you had software that incorporated the data regarding your most important assets? In other words: efficient, powerful GIS systems are an important aspect of the future of government and fleet management. GIS data can provide a number of critical pieces of information:
- Custom base maps that demonstrate time-lapsed events/studies
- Spatial relationship tracking to depict regional trends or developments
- Bi-directional integration utilizing Geodatabases as an asset inventory
- Condition and cost summary updates from your asset management system to your GIS system
- Status of work orders and service request features for your GIS data (created and updated)
- And more!
Imagine how much more efficient your government or fleet operations would be if you had the above information at the touch of your fingers? No longer do you have to manually investigate issues or spend extra resources to closely monitor developments in your community. These savings could really add up!
What else can GIS data do?
In addition, the information from your GIS data can influence your decision-making in order to create more eco-friendly practices. You may observe trends in population migration, vehicle-based pollution, natural disaster occurrences and more. As a result, your everyday fleet practices might change to adapt to your newly uncovered data. Would you want to change to cleaner vehicles if your GIS data reported that your region was particularly polluted? What if one of your areas was prone to road destruction, or required four-wheel drive vehicles, would that affect your vehicle purchasing?
Some county and state governments are using GIS to collaborate with their utilities, DoTs, Parks and Rec and other departments in order to efficiently respond to pressing matters. For example, some states have employed GIS data to coordinate natural disaster information and organize it so that they could more efficiently manage their available disaster recovery resources. In similar states, GIS data was used to describe emergency information and the necessity of repairs through consistent data across all platforms. Without a unified system, these departments could have been talking to each other through different measurement units, time frames, map legends and colors and more that may have significantly slowed down the process during because of required information translation periods.
Is it time to work collaboratively with your various government, fleet and enterprise asset management entities? The potential savings, efficiencies and community service improvements are substantial!
AssetWorks Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) software is already integrated with Esri GIS. This powerful connection means that you can consolidate data by leveraging existing investments in Esri technology with asset management information, improve communication by bridging the gap between field personnel and in-office management through the map-based view, ensure accuracy by facilitating the reconciliation of errors in your GIS software and easily update attributes or modify features. In addition, it has a full integration with AssetWorks FleetFocus, the premier fleet management software.
