Recommendations for State of Delaware GIS Coordination and Governance

PROJECT SYNOPSIS

To address the lack of "consistent Geographic Information System (GIS) governance within the State," the University of Delaware’s Institute for Public Administration (IPA) partnered with the Delaware Department of Transportation (DelDOT) and the Office of State Planning Coordination (OSPC) within the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to complete a study of Delaware’s approach to GIS governance.1 This study considered Delaware’s current and historic use and governance of geospatial data and applications; background research on GIS coordination and governance models used by other states; responses from a survey of Delaware GIS stakeholders; and findings from semi-structured interviews with Delaware Geographic Data Committee (DGDC) participants and other Delaware GIS stakeholders on the current and potential functioning of statewide GIS governance.

Based on this analysis, the IPA team agrees with the findings of a 2012 GIS business plan for Delaware: “collegial and cooperative efforts have gone as far as they can go.”2 The State of Delaware has achieved impressive outcomes through “ad hoc” GIS coordination, including leveraging investments in geospatial data and analysis for the more effective, efficient, and transparent delivery of many state programs and services. However, the current scale of geospatial investments across state agencies outstrips the capacity of Delaware’s loosely coordinated GIS governance approach to prioritize, fund, monitor, and diffuse lessons from these investments.

Table 1 summarizes the alternatives that IPA developed and considered while formulating the recommendations for this study. While all the options present tradeoffs, IPA recommends that the State of Delaware establish a Geographic Information Officer (GIO) position in the Delaware Department of Technology & Information (DTI). Details of this recommendation and the analysis that led to it appear in the body of this report.