Esri in One Hour: Stacia Taggart on GIS in Transportation

Today I met with Stacia Taggart for my first “Esri in One Hour” chat involving discussion of industry implementation of GIS. Stacia has recently transitioned from a development role to this more customer-oriented implementation role, and we also discussed this transition.

Departments of Transportation are one of the most rapid areas of new growth for the adoption of a System of Engagement (SoE) built upon ArcGIS Enterprise. Esri’s first successful Department of Transportation SoE implementation was with New York State Department of Transportation (NYSDOT). I had heard a short recap of this successful engagement at the Professional Services Open Meeting during my first week; Esri had helped NYSDOT to develop a snow management app, which enabled intelligent tracking of snow plow resources, allowing them to view real-time updates on snow removal across the state. I remember this had been initially presented to NYSDOT as somewhat of a proof-of-concept, which was quickly accelerated to be built out and deployed for a full snow season. This served as one of the first great, successful case studies for enabling real-time location intelligence for Departments of Transportation, and this seems to have been the first group of apps to inspire some currently worked on “DOT Solutions” packages.

• Esri Snow Common Operating Picture (COP)
• New York State GIS Clearinghouse
• Article on integrating weather data to assist in efficient snow removal

The second System of Engagement is actually in Colorado, with the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT). This is where Stacia comes in as a key Colorado point-person. Quickly following, Louisiana, Florida, Rhode Island, Texas, and a growing list of DOTS have lined up to sign-on for similar relationships to enable ArcGIS to help in their respective areas. Many additional DOTs have shown interest, which is a massive and rapid increase in this user base which is requiring new configuration patterns for common transportation use cases.

We talked about the order of engaging in new areas such as this, which I have been curious about. A current overarching goal in Esri engagements is to make GIS a true enterprise system. Accessibility for everyone in organizations is the main focus of this goal, and a key niche ArcGIS Online is growing to fill. I clarified one of the acronyms which I haven’t been totally sure of yet, “System of Engagement” (SoE), which, in this context, is the context of location intelligence through ArcGIS that individuals across company levels can engage with every day, in approachable, clear, precise, and accurate ways. This helps me to contextualize the role of ArcGIS Online even more, especially following my discussion with Jeremy about more levels of ArcGIS Enterprise deployments.

Generally, an SoE engagement starts with a sales order, which flows to a needs assessment. In this needs assessment phase, an Esri advisor meets with all departments to assess goals and user requirements. This also allows for establishment of who end users are, and perspective on end user requirements.

Following this needs assessment, the technical advisor will come up with an implementation plan lining out the number and type of apps that can be created to fit with these end user goals and requirements. These proposed apps are ranked according to level of effort and business value; for example, the apps requiring the lowest level of effort to result in the greatest business value will bubble to the top of this.

These commercial off-the-shelf approaches of easily configured and deployed applications for specific use cases and workflows are quickly becoming normalized, however, and it seems to me that this will help with the accelerating pace of ArcGIS adoption in transportation and other industries. Customization still has a role in creating effective applications, but these configurable approaches may get the software into beneficial areas more efficiently and quickly, to start.

We talked about how this new role with DOT engagements was vastly different for Stacia from her development background. As a dot net developer, Stacia worked more independently on project work. Development was task and requirement oriented, and full of personal problem solving. In this new role, she is constantly communicating with customers and stakeholders. I immensely respect her ability to switch roles so vastly, and she seems to be doing it with grace and the conduit of problem-solving, just in a different format than development. She emphasized the importance of networking at Esri, however, and commented on how valuable she felt it was to maintain relationships and have a support system across the company, which further supported this new role.

Stacia was the first person I have talked to where I could envision working on a project very similar to what she is doing with DOTs, which was a little nerve wracking! It is exciting but also nerve-inducing to picture an industry role. I was excited and intrigued by her new role negotiating between massive customer bases in a new industry where ArcGIS and location intelligence can massively expand and change the entire landscape of workflows, organization, and public-perception. This networking in a new area and thinking of massive scalability really got me excited, which was interesting to notice. However, I also see the appeal of staying hands-on as a developer. It has been calming and creative to be able to focus on development projects this summer, in distinction from my meeting-heavy networking calendar more similar to Stacia’s wall of calls scheduled during the year.

I really admire Stacia’s ability to span both of these areas, and look forward to Esri expanding ArcGIS Enterprise into DOTs across the country. CDOT seems like a large engagement, and I hope the Denver Regional Office can expand to support this early and pioneering work enabling Web GIS in transportation. Stacia commented that GIS has historically been reserved for GIS experts, but these successful deployments will make it easy to access and use by everyone. I think ArcGIS Online, these successful application deployments, and a growing wealth of case studies are probably going to rapidly accelerate the adoption of ArcGIS not only in transportation, but across industries. The benefit is becoming more clear, and more effectively shared, and I’m somewhat on the edge of my seat waiting for this implementation trend to explode in magnitude, speed, and results.