MapBrief™

As a consultant always keeping one eye on the horizon for the next gig (*cough*), I reconnoiter the industry job ads to get a sense of what skills are hot, where the demand is, and what companies are hiring. Especially for programmer/developer jobs, many of these ads are little more than HR cut-and-paste jobs culled from past departmental postings, RFPs, and whatever new acronym some “non-technical” manager picked up from the latest issue of ArcNews.

But every now and then I come across a posting so transcending the genre with Cluelessness and Fail that it merits close examination for laying bare larger Truths about the GIS industry that usually go unspoken.

Behold this ad for “SR.GIS APPLICATIONS DEVELOPER” (LINK, pdf).

(* I don’t know anyone at the Boston Redevelopment Authority, but I’m sure they’re fine law-abiding folk who love their children…)

Let’s start with the endless laundry list of technolgies:

ArcSDE, ArcObjects, Python, SQL Server, ArcInfo, OGC protocols, markup languages (all of them, apparently), ArcXML, Flash, ASP, Flex, VB, XML, HTML, EDN, SQL Server 2008 R2, .NET, Apple iOS, Windows mobile, Computer-Aided Design, LIDAR, 3D Analyst, SketchUp, HTML5, CSS3, Financial Edge general ledger (??), AutoCAD Map 3D

With the exception of the unconscionable omissions of JavaBeans and ColdFusion, that pretty much covers every technology that’s floated through GIS departments since the dawn of the new millennium.  And for the technically savvy who are the presumed target of this job search, the juxtaposition of the latest-and-greatest with stuff that has long since been taken around back and put out of its misery provides both great unintentional comedy as well as proof-positive of a management team that Just Doesn’t Get It.

But let’s play along and assume the stringent standards indicate an aggressive shop pushing into the frontiers of mapping where mere mortals fear to tread.  Actually, no, not at all:

2005 wants its map interfaces back.

While all of this is snark-worthy, we haven’t even gotten to the troubling parts:

Develop applications, scripts, and automation routines utilizing ArcObjects and Python to enhance the use of GIS within operational business practices…
Assist in creating and maintaining interactive mapping servers within the BRA. Manage ArcSDE on SQL server.

OK, reasonable.

Collaborate with other City GIS experts to share data; work toward an inter-agency Enterprise GIS…
Assist City MIS in providing solutions (desktop and Web) to integrate GIS with other enterprise city applications…
Evaluate data warehousing options; recommend warehousing solution…

I’m starting to smell mission creep.

Assist Urban Design Technology Group…
Provide support for the agency websites, both current and the one soon to be developed…
Collaborate with the Computer Programming Manager…work on connecting existing agency databases to 3rd party applications such as Financial Edge general ledger, ABRA HR, and city GIS…

Uh, who the hell don’t I work for?

Perform other related duties as required.

Thank you sir, may I have another.

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Remember, this is Senior position.  Can you imagine a Senior Programmer, a Senior DBA, a Senior Graphic Designer, or a Senior Systems Administrator ever consenting to a job description that gives carte blanche to every middle manager with a crisis to come barging into their cube and demanding to have their problem solved?  Of course not.  But because of GIS’ rich history of consenting to be the IT department’s bastard step-child, even senior people with quality skill sets just end up being de facto errand boys for the parts of the org chart that don’t have trouble with self-assertion.

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Since we like to keep it positive around these parts, let’s look at a similar position recently posted by DTS Agile.  Unlike the folks mentioned earlier, DTS actually does cutting edge stuff and has a high profile in the industry.  Note that instead of trying to bust balls with the acronym laundry-list, they succinctly lay out the key components they work with and where they’re trying to go technology-wise.  Sprinkle in some philosophy about how they work, and you come away feeling the posting was written by actual human beings who gave it some thought.  But the innovative part is the assumption that experienced professionals respond best to big challenges and the collegiality of motivated colleagues.  A pretty novel approach where the typical career progression is merely an ever-lengthening list of responsibilities and the slow drowning in a sea of administrivia.

—Brian Timoney

With ever-present budget pressures, GIS heads are wrestling with which combination of server admin and paid cloud subscriptions (ESRI, Google, MapBox, CartoDB, et al) make the most financial sense as well as serving user needs. A few weeks back Tobin Bradley at Mecklenburg County, NC, wanted to determine how visitors used the Google API options such as Street View, Traffic, and Google Earth view.  Answer: between 2.2% and 3.5%.

Having real, actual data enables a useful discussion of the ROI of web mapping services. Here in Denver, Allan Glen (Twitter, blog), head of the city’s web GIS team has collected granular usage data that provides a fascinating glimpse into how the public actually uses maps.  Starting last April, Denver’s team started rolling out “single-topic” maps (e.g. city parks) as embeddable widgets throughout the city’s website as a complement to the more typical everything-but-the-kitchen-sink map “portal”.

Here’s some of what he shared with your indefatigable blogger:

Metric #1   Single-Topic maps get 3 times the traffic of the traditional Map Portal

Not only do single-topic maps outdraw the map portal at a 3-1 clip, overall web map usage has more than tripled from approximately 25K visits per month to 90K visits a month.  Sal in Public Works may love that he has 55 data layers in a single map interface, your public–not so much.

Metric #2    60% of map traffic comes directly from search engine requests.

If you’re lucky, your map portal will have its very own button on the ever-more-cluttered local government home page where every pixel is someone’s “turf” to be guarded with Hunger Games ferocity. Single-topic maps enable more specific SEO techniques so entering a perfectly natural term into Google–“Denver park”–puts the single-topic parks map (“Find a Park”) at the top of the results. Boom! Web maps getting more eyeballs and drawing traffic just like the normal web.

Metric #3    Auto-complete drives clean user queries

It’s 2012–if you don’t have auto-complete you’re failing your users as they seethe trying to enter their street address or park name EXACTLY as it appears in your precious database. Denver is using the open-source Lucene project and throwing everything–addresses, park names, rec facilities, etc.–into a single entry box with Google-like auto-complete. In Denver the most common request is for “Washington Park”–a yuppie oasis where I’m forced to ponder the dark recesses of the human heart given the preponderance of couples in matching lycra.

   In 2012 auto-complete in non-negotiable

Metric #4   Map Usage is Spiky

Elections and snowstorms drive usage spikes. But the biggest one-day pop in map requests? Open Doors Denver–a city-wide weekend celebration of architecture–racked up over 8000 map requests on the Friday prior.

Spiky usage is an additional argument for single-topic maps as the Mac-wielding architecture enthusiasts do not want to sift through your fire hydrant and zoning layers in plotting out their weekend festival stroll.

Metric #5 People Look Up Info on Maps, and Leave

Average map visit time is 1:43. Local government maps are about information retrieval. Once the maps load, users just start clicking on markers at a clip six times greater than entering search terms. Are you zen enough to design maps for users that want to leave quickly?

Metric #6 People Actually Interact with Balloon Content

Of the 1.7M markers clicked in the past eight months, users clicked on 250K hyperlinks inside info balloons.

Metric #7 People Rarely Change Default Map Settings

GIS people love to add basemap options. Users, as we have seen, are looking for information: they toggle from the default street view to aerial or hybrid a whopping TWO PERCENT (2%) of the time.

Oh, and they have no idea what that “full-screen” button does (0.5%)

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Interesting, no? What’s clear to me is what local government maps need is less GIS and a lot more user-friendly auto-complete and SEO. Because in the end users want search and retrieval to work for maps the way it works for the rest of the web.

—Brian Timoney

All words are prejudices.

-Nietzsche

The first problem with Data Management is that it’s called “Data Management.”

In the NFL there is a certain type of quarterback about which the best that can be said is that they are “game managers“. Their talent lies not in a strong arm or pinpoint accuracy but in not fumbling, not throwing interceptions, not taking sacks–in short, they stay within themselves.

These quarterbacks don’t win games for teams; they just try not to lose them.

Not wholly unlike the corporate attitude towards Data Management: don’t be too much of a burdensome cost-center, don’t lose anything too important, don’t get in the way of employees “doing their job”. The most important data (at least what was considered the most important data sometime in the early 1990s when the Sun Sparc workstations were purchased) is coerced into the third normal form relational database, with everything else being dumped into folders on the shared drive.

                                  the Data Management team, hard at work

While billion-dollar companies have sprung up that have data management at their very core–Google, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn–far too many self-styled ‘real-economy’ firms allow their employees view Data Management as the grown-up equivalent of eating one’s vegetables or cleaning one’s room.  I once witnessed the head of an Engineering Department declare that if anyone wanted his department’s files uploaded to the new 7-figure document management system, they better hire some college kid interns and leave his people alone.

The best-laid schemes of mice and men, etc.

Software’s power and promise is ever on the increase.  But I have yet to see it triumph over an internal corporate culture where workers have been conditioned to see Data Management as someone else’s problem. Big rewards await whomever can figure out how to motivate employees to organize and annotate the work that puts food on their table with the same gusto that they take the unpromising ephemera of their personal life to construct an online “social presence”.

Until then, competitive peril awaits those firms for whom “Data Management” is a separate, named thing, distinct from how they drive profits.

—Brian Timoney