Abstract: Effective enterprise GIS requires a team performing various distinct roles (management, programming, analysis, etc.). Gaudet, Annulis & Carr proposed a ‘Geospatial Technology Competency Model’ based on typical knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSA’s) associated with each GIS role. Each role includes typical outputs (maps, data, applications, etc.) that enterprise GIS customers expect. But what is the ideal mix of enterprise GIS-related roles and competencies? Within enterprise GIS, what KSA’s are being used and to what degree? How efficiently do GIS staff members apply KSA’s to deliver the outputs demanded? This paper outlines data from the King County GIS (KCGIS) Center’s staff activity time recording system (TRS). KCGIS TRS data will be analyzed against similar data collected from a 2004 survey of four-dozen city, county, and regional enterprise GIS operations in the Pacific Northwest. Examples will be presented to show how GIS activity statistics can be used to improve operational efficiency, develop meaningful budgets and long term staffing plans, improve hiring and professional development, and support individual career development.

1. Greg Babinski, GISP
Finance & Marketing Manager
King County GIS Center
201 South Jackson Street, MS: KSC-NR-0706
Seattle, WA 98104
Voice: 206-263-3753; Fax: 206-263-3145;
Email: greg.babinski@metrokc.gov
IMPROVING ENTERPRISE GIS OPERATIONS
VIA STAFF USAGE ANALYSIS AND SURVEYS
Abstract: Effective enterprise GIS requires a team performing
various distinct roles (management, programming, analysis, etc.).
Gaudet, Annulis & Carr proposed a ‘Geospatial Technology
Competency Model’ based on typical knowledge, skills, and abilities
(KSA’s) associated with each GIS role. Each role includes typical
outputs (maps, data, applications, etc.) that enterprise GIS
customers expect. But what is the ideal mix of enterprise GIS-
related roles and competencies? Within enterprise GIS, what KSA’s
are being used and to what degree? How efficiently do GIS staff
members apply KSA’s to deliver the outputs demanded? This paper
outlines data from the King County GIS (KCGIS) Center’s staff
activity time recording system (TRS). KCGIS TRS data will be
analyzed against similar data collected from a 2004 survey of four-
dozen city, county, and regional enterprise GIS operations in the
Pacific Northwest. Examples will be presented to show how GIS
activity statistics can be used to improve operational efficiency,
develop meaningful budgets and long term staffing plans, improve
hiring and professional development, and support individual career
development.
INTRODUCTION
An effective enterprise GIS requires a team performing various distinct
roles (management, programming, analysis, etc.). Gaudet, Annulis & Carr
proposed a ‘Geospatial Technology Competency Model’ based on typical
knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSA’s) associated with each GIS role.
Each role includes typical outputs (maps, data, applications, etc.) that
enterprise GIS customers expect. But what is the ideal mix of enterprise
GIS-related roles and competencies? Within enterprise GIS, what KSA’s
are being used and to what degree? How efficiently do GIS staff

2. members apply KSA’s to deliver the outputs demanded? This paper
outlines data from the King County GIS (KCGIS) Center’s staff activity time
recording system (TRS). KCGIS TRS data will be analyzed against similar
data collected from a 2004 survey of four-dozen city, county, and regional
enterprise GIS operations in the Pacific Northwest.
The King County Geographic Information System (KCGIS) is a
consolidated and coordinated regional geographic information resource,
organized to meet the business needs of King County, local agencies, and
the general public. KCGIS is comprised of both the King County GIS
Center (an internal service fund, responsible for core GIS resources and
enterprise GIS services for the entire County) and business specific
activity in various GIS programs distributed across other County agencies.
GIS in King County is used for a wide variety of business applications,
including mapping, public information delivery, growth management &
planning, property assessment, land development permitting, site
selection, simulating environmental conditions, emergency response
planning, crime analysis, transportation planning, bus & van routing, road
maintenance management, public health service delivery, E911
operations, airport sound abatement, and boundary management
(legislative districts, voter precincts, tax unit boundaries, etc.).
WHY TRACK GIS STAFF ACTIVITY?
Enterprise GIS operation is a complex activity. The Geospatial Technology
Competency Model identifies 12 distinct ‘roles’ required for enterprise GIS
operations. Each of these GIS ‘role’ requires mastery of a set of
knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSA’s), which Gaudet, Annulis, and Carr
refer to as competencies. They identify 39 separate GIS-related
competencies. Each GIS ‘role’ is responsible for delivery of ‘outputs’ to
customers or co-workers. 138 separate types of GIS outputs are
identified.
The KCGIS Center and many other enterprise GIS programs catalogue the
competencies their staff members possess, either formally of informally.
Most GIS managers know by experience that each of the various roles and
competencies are important for successful operations.
An analysis of actual GIS staff activity can provide additional valuable
insight into enterprise GIS operations. Information about the actual time
spent by all the staff members of an enterprise GIS operation can
illuminate the actual level of effort for each GIS staff person, the level of
effort by GIS ‘role’ for enterprise GIS functions, and the level of effort to
deliver GIS ‘outputs.’ GIS managers can use this information to aid work

3. load balancing, improve hiring decisions, facilitate development of backup
capability and succession planning, and support individual staff career
development.
A time recording and tracking system that can provide the information
needed for GIS staff activity analysis can also meet other management
goals. These can include management ‘due-diligence,’ customer billing,
setting costs or rates for services, and meeting grant reporting and audit
requirement. The information derived from a detailed time tracking
system can also facilitate comparisons with other agencies (bench-
marking), comparisons with previous years activity, and support ‘activity-
based cost analysis.’
TIME TRACKING SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS & IMPLEMENTATION
The KCGIS Center decided to enhance its staff time recording and
reporting capability in 2002. The primary business driver for this decision
was the need to record accurately the activity of 29 staff members
performing a variety of GIS roles for three ‘GIS business lines’ and report
actual labor costs for hundreds of internal and external customers. Time
tracking system requirements included a web-based design that would
support both activity recording and project reporting. It had to be flexible
and simple to use, easy to administer, support invoicing, and be cheap to
acquire, manage and use.
Options considered by the KCGIS Center included adapting the
Countywide time reporting system (rejected because of rigidity and cost of
modifications), an old custom Oracle GIS application (Time Card), two
commercial applications (Replicon Web TimeSheet and ClickTime), and a
custom MS Access based Time Recording System (TRS) developed by King
County’s permitting department. The TRS system was chosen because
the functionality needed to record and report permit technician and
building inspector activity was similar in complexity to GIS. The system is
web based and had proven to be very robust and reliable. GIS did require
some application customizing, but was able to share these costs with King
County’s Parks Division, which adopted TRS at the same time.
Some lessons KCGIS learned from implementing the new time recording
system included the need to ‘normalize’ entries by staff during start up.
Analysis of time records after the first few months of use made it
apparent that some staff were interpreting time codes inconsistently,
resulting in questionable activity time records. This problem could have
been minimized by defining expected entries for each employee, then
working one on one with staff to verify any surprising entries. Foot-
draggers need to be identified quickly also and coached to keep entries up

4. to date. A campaign to look at TRS as the first and last activity each day
has helped improve accuracy and timeliness.
PRELIMINARY GIS STAFF ACTIVITY LESSONS LEARNED
The KCGIS Center utilized initial TRS data for normal staff activity
verification, project reporting, and customer billing purposes. After about
six months of data was compiled, KCGIS Center management also
performed a comparison of our expected level of activity by GIS ‘roles’
with actual reported levels. While actual KCGIS activity for the majority of
the roles came very close to our expected levels, several categories
provided surprises.
Total hours spent working on some roles was higher than expected.
Actual management hours were twice the expected level, while program
management hours were four times the expected level. Our time devoted
to system management work was about 15% higher than expected.
Work performing other roles was lower than anticipated. For example,
actual mapping and analysis work was about three quarters of the
expected level, while both training/end-user support and GIS application
development were about half what we expected.
More detailed analysis of this data allowed us to understand these
discrepancies and adjust expectations. For example, the higher level of
management hours was traced to management, supervisory, and lead
staff, who are expected to be working managers, but who worked fewer
project related hours than expected. The result of this insight was an
increase in the hours allocated to management overhead for our 2005
budget plus a plan to closely monitor supervisory project work charges.
It appears that the higher level of hours charged to program management
and the lower level charged to both training and application development
are related. Our training program was undergoing a redesign and
enhanced marketing effort during the initial six month data period,
resulting in a large number of hours being spent on program
management, rather than actual training activity. It also appears that
demand for GIS help desk services has seen an actual decline in use. The
lower level of application development work also appears to have been
related to a major ArcGIS software migration planning effort underway
during the six month period, resulting in a significant quantity of budgeted
application development hours allocated to program management instead.
KCGIS Center management and staff have now learned that our TRS data
is a valuable tool for understanding the level of effort required for each of

5. the GIS roles needed to support our enterprise GIS program. Managers
and supervisors use staff activity time data on a monthly basis. The
administrative effort needed to produce invoices for work billed on an
hourly basis has declined and the accuracy and completeness of the
invoices has improved. Actual project time data also allows us to
generate more accurate estimates for proposed projects as well. The
KCGIS Center will begin performing semi-annual analysis of this data to
look for general trends and opportunities to refine our operations and
overall staffing model.
EXTERNAL GIS STAFF ACTIVITY ANALYSIS
As the KCGIS Center was implementing its TRS GIS activity time recording
system, it became apparent that a comparison of our budgeted time
allocations with other enterprise GIS programs might be useful to help
analyze our operations and aid other agency GIS managers as well.
A simple survey was sent to 96 enterprise GIS managers in the Pacific
Northwest. One section of the survey asked for the estimated allocation
of the agency’s total GIS staff time to each of 12 defined GIS activities.
These activities basically correspond to the GIS roles defined by Gaudet,
Annulis, and Carr. Two questions focused how enterprise GIS services
were provided to the agency – by a single central service provider, or by
some other means (distributed, outside service provider, other). Two
questions were designed to determine the total number of individual staff
members who provide enterprise GIS services within the agency and the
total number of ‘full time equivalents’ (FTE’s) who provide those services.
Total number of individual staff captures the number of people who spend
at least 10% of their time on GIS duties. Total number of FTE’s reflects
total level of effort. For instance, two people who each work on GIS
100% of their time represents a total of 2.00 FTE’s, while three people
who each work 50% of their time on GIS represents 1.50 FTE’s.
Of the 96 agencies that were sent surveys, 45 responded. Responses
were received from agencies in Washington, Oregon, Idaho and British
Columbia. Responses came from 19 cities, 14 counties, five utilities, and
three tribes. In addition, various federal, state, provincial, and regional
agencies also responded to the survey.
Table 1 illustrates the responses from all agencies showing both total GIS
staff members and GIS FTE’s. Agencies surveyed have an average of
11.76 total staff who work on GIS, with an average FTE total of 7.64,
which represents about 65% of total GIS staff.

6. TABLE 1:
ALL AGENCIES RAW AVERAGE VS. FTE-WEIGHTED AVERAGE
Total staff/GIS FTE’s: 11.76 7.64
GIS Activity: Raw Average Weighted Average
Application Development: 7.9% 10.8%
Data Acquisition: 5.3% 5.4%
Data Development: 11.3% 10.4%
Data Maintenance: 17.0% 14.8%
Data Management: 5.6% 5.8%
Systems Management: 4.1% 4.5%
Systems Analysis: 3.8% 3.7%
Data Analysis: 8.5% 10.7%
GIS Mapping: 17.5% 15.2%
Management & Administration: 8.6% 7.5%
Project Management: 5.4% 5.3%
Training & User Support: 4.3% 4.8%
Other: 0.8% 1.2%
Table 1 also shows the average allocation by the 12 categories of GIS
activities. Raw average percentages are shown, as well as weighted
percentages, which reflect the total number of FTE and the percentage
allocation for each agency. Raw average totals that are higher than
weighted average totals reflect activities that require proportionally more
effort for smaller sized GIS programs. This data suggests that smaller GIS
programs spend proportionally more time on data maintenance and
mapping activities, while larger programs spend increased proportions of
staff resources on programming and data analysis.
Table 2 illustrates the weighted average for all agencies compared to the
KCGIS Center estimated totals. Key differences between KCGIS and other
enterprise GIS operations include a smaller percentage of time for data
development. We believe this results from the mature nature of KCGIS
with little current enterprise data development activity. The higher
percentage of data management reflects the complex multi-agency data
maintenance environment in King County, with data from many
departments and outside sources needing to be integrated into our GIS
data warehouse. While percentages for GIS mapping and data analysis
seem significantly different, the totals for the two activities are similar for
both KCGIS and the 45 survey respondents. Analysis of our TRS data
suggests that many of our end-user clients are capable of doing their own
mapping work, but require help with more sophisticated data analysis
projects. The survey percentages for M&A and project management
confirm our need to understand and monitor the higher KCGIS Center
staff allocation to these categories.

7. TABLE 2:
ALL FTE-WEIGHTED AVERAGE VS. KCGIS ESTIMATED TOTAL
Total GIS FTE’s: 7.64 29.00
GIS Activity: Weighted Average KCGIS Estimate
Application Development: 10.8% 10.0%
Data Acquisition: 5.4% 2.5%
Data Development: 10.4% 5.0%
Data Maintenance: 14.8% 15.0%
Data Management: 5.8% 7.5%
Systems Management: 4.5% 5.0%
Systems Analysis: 3.7% 2.5%
Data Analysis: 10.7% 20.0%
GIS Mapping: 15.2% 7.5%
Management & Administration: 7.5% 12.5%
Project Management: 5.3% 7.5%
Training & User Support: 4.8% 5.0%
Other: 1.2% 0.0%
TABLE 3:
COUNTY FTE-WEIGHTED AVERAGE VS. KCGIS ESTIMATED TOTAL
Total GIS FTE’s: 10.34 29.00
GIS Activity: Weighted Average KCGIS Estimate
Application Development: 8.9% 10.0%
Data Acquisition: 3.5% 2.5%
Data Development: 11.8% 5.0%
Data Maintenance: 16.3% 15.0%
Data Management: 4.8% 7.5%
Systems Management: 3.7% 5.0%
Systems Analysis: 2.3% 2.5%
Data Analysis: 11.2% 20.0%
GIS Mapping: 20.1% 7.5%
Management & Administration: 8.1% 12.5%
Project Management: 4.3% 7.5%
Training & User Support: 5.1% 5.0%
Other: 0.0% 0.0%
Table 3 illustrates the weighted average for just the 14 counties compared
to the KCGIS Center estimated totals. Counties in the survey have an
average of 10.34 FTE’s, 35% more than the average for all agencies, but
still less than half of the KCGIS Center total. Key differences between
KCGIS and other county GIS programs include an even smaller percentage
of time for data development. The combined percentages for GIS

8. mapping and data analysis is higher for just counties, but still similar to
the KCGIS total for the two. The survey percentages for M&A for counties
is closer to the KCGIS total, but still about one third lower.
CONCLUSIONS
The KCGIS Center is committed to continued use of a GIS activity based
time recording and reporting system. With three county departments now
using TRS, there is a significant community that has demonstrated the
utility of detailed time recording for better management. The activity and
project-based reports have improved KCGIS Center operations and
illustrated areas where additional attention is needed.
The regional GIS staff analysis survey provided useful data to validate
KCGIS Center statistics. The result has been a better understanding of
the actual GIS roles and the competencies we use to provide GIS services
and products to our customers. Project estimating has been improved
and convenient reporting utilities aid incremental project status reporting.
An understanding of the actual GIS competencies we utilize to perform
our work aids in developing an overall understanding of the knowledge,
skills, and abilities we need to maintain and helps prioritize individual staff
training plans.
No two agencies’ operations are alike, but a comparison of staff activity
statistics can illustrate common trends of value for enterprise GIS
management. Widespread tracking and analysis of GIS staff activity
statistics can improve future enterprise GIS operations.
REFERENCE
Reference: Gaudet, Annulis, Carr: Workforce Development Model for
Geospatial Technology. University of Southern Mississippi, 2001.
GB: gb:kc:urisa2004abstract(Gbstaffsurvey).doc August 18,2022