Be Emergency Ready
Our business is build on the belief that knowing where things happen matters to your business. Last winters heavy snowfalls highlighted the need for greater collaboration and communicaton between local, national and public services to co-ordinate their response. Through the effective and efficient use and application of Geographic Information public services can meet these challenges head on.
If you'd like more information on how you can your organisation Emergency Ready or how best to collaborate with other stakeholder agencies during times of Emergency, please email us at help@esri-ireland.ie
To see this is action, check out disaster and emergency response interactive maps and more detailed information here: Emergency Response
Mapping the Bottom Line
At a time when our Government is under increasing pressure to stimulate the economy, it is now more important than ever that we make effective and efficient use of the scarce and valuable resources that are available to us. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is one such resource that will help create jobs, attract inward investment, identify opportunities for revenue growth and reduce costs across many industry sectors in Ireland.
GIS is used extensively across the public sector in this country, yet Government has not been in a position to harness its value or unlock its potential in supporting a better more competitive delivery of public services. In the April edition of Public Sector Times I wrote about how public sector organisations are attaching a location to every piece of data they hold thus creating a new and valuable source of information, Geospatial Information.
Everything happens somewhere and geospatial information enables evidence based decisions to be made with respect to “where” public services are needed, “where” they are not needed, “where” they need improvement or “where” they need to be withdrawn. At a Government level, making spatially related decisions without the underlying spatial information to support such decisions could cost the tax payer billions of Euros. We need only look to what has transpired over the last few years in the area planning and property development, for supporting evidence of how critical geospatial information is in formulating, managing and monitoring Government policy.
Last year the Local Government Association (LGA), in the UK, published a report on the value of geospatial information to Local Government authorities in England and Wales. The report maintains that, in 2008/2009, geospatial information contributed over £230 million in efficiency gains in public service delivery. The average annualised cost benefit ratio was found to be 1:2.5 which corroborates some of the work Esri Ireland have been doing with our own customers that has shown a return on investment of up to 1:4. One of the more interesting findings of this report was that Government taxation revenue was £44m better off as a result of the effective and efficient use of geospatial information.
So what of our own public service? This year we at Esri Ireland have begun a process of engaging our public sector customers in an attempt to help them get a better understanding of the value of geospatial information to their respective businesses and organisations. We call this “Mapping the Bottom Line” and in conjunction with the Geological Survey of Ireland (GSI) we have recently published the first case study by a public sector organisation in Ireland that examines the value of geospatial information to their business.
Using geospatial information to map areas of natural beauty and cultural history has helped the GSI attract €1m investment from the European Union (EU) to establish UNESCO-backed tourist attractions, which in turn helps create sustainable employment within the state. Geospatial information is crucial to our national marine mapping programme and a national project at the GSI called INFOMAR is helping to increase state territory by 57,000km2 which in turn increases opportunities for greater revenue generation by the state.
A recent cost benefit analysis report has found that Ireland could make a €360m return on its investment in this project, more than four times its cost. Geospatial information is helping the GSI deliver spatial services to other public sector organisations to assist them in meeting their compliance and regulatory obligations under a number of EU directives thus helping the state to avoid heavy financial penalties from Europe. Geospatial information is helping the GSI to manage and maintain information from 86,000 boreholes across Dublin, thus reducing the costs of site investigations and potentially saving the construction industry millions of Euros in development costs.
Geospatial information is protecting people and property by helping to manage, monitor and predict areas of the country that are prone to landslides thus mitigating a state compensation and repair bill of potentially billions of Euros, as was the case in the west of Ireland in 2004. Geospatial information is helping to improve the quality of decisions for over 2000 registered users of the GSI’s data holdings, 29% of which are located outside Ireland, suggesting that this information is being used to help international development projects to locate here in Ireland. And all of this is from just one of our state agencies!
The need for the effective and efficient use geospatial information underpins our Programme for Government and supports open and transparent public service delivery, which is increasingly being demanded by the general public. The time is now for Government to grasp this valuable resource, to be innovative in its use and to demand a return on its investment.
The New Programme of Government - Will GIS be placed at the core?
Our new Programme for Government is a very ambitious document that promises to make Ireland more competitive. I believe that Geographic Information Systems (GIS) offers significant potential to help us become more competitive by doing better with less across a range of social, environmental and business domains.
The Public Sector, globally, is increasingly using GIS as a platform to build systems and solutions that help deliver transparency, engage citizens, and enhance policymaking. Here in Ireland GIS has been in use since the mid to late eighties, when early adopters such as Coillte Teoranta and the Department of Environment, Heritage & Local Government (DEHLG) were quick to identify its potential for evidence based decision making.
Twenty years on, these and many other Central and Local Government organisations now use GIS to reveal patterns, trends and relationships that give different perspectives and insights from which better and more informed decisions can be made.
At Esri Ireland we continuously strive to do things differently and better on behalf of our customers. As a result we have achieved combined annual (2010) cost savings of approximately €1.6 million to our public sector customers.
Recent studies we have carried out in the UK have shown a 4:1 ratio in the return of investment on the use and application of GIS where organisations have embedded geographic information as part of its overall business information strategy.
Paul's full article Attaching a location to every piece of data is published in the April edition of the Public Sector Times.
To read more on this subject and other opinion articles by Paul, visit the Esri Ireland Blog. Written by - Paul Synnott - Country Manager, Esri Ireland.