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Using GIS in the Workplace: A Case Study
- 1. GIS IN THE WORKPLACE Steve Campbell Borough of Poole
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Editor's Notes
- Good morning to you all My name is Steve Campbell and I am the GIS Manager of the Borough of Poole And I am here to talk to you today about how GIS is used in the workplace. When I left university, I had no real idea about what work options were available to me, only knowing that I wanted to work with GIS, so I hope that this presentation today will give you an insight into the variety and breadth of potential places where you could work and use GIS as part of your employment. The talk will focus how we use GIS at Poole, How it is used in the rest of the public, private and third sector and also give some pointers as to where the industry is going and what skills are required to get ahead in GI related employment. But first I’ll tell you a little bit about myself I have a BSc in Geography, an MSc in GIS
- I’m a father of three little cherubs
- And I’m always tired
- I’m also partial to cartography.. But more than that I’m interested on the analysis on information when it’s on a map...
- Can anyone tell me where in the world this is and why this map is important? London, Cholera Epidemic in Soho – isolated at Broad Street Water Pump. Handle Removed, Cholera cases dropped. First major study of public health and geography. Putting information on the map to provide greater understanding. Location becomes a significant factor in learning and solving problems. 1 8 5 4
- So spatial data/location information is hugely important to the borough of Poole. In order to make informed decisions, we need the right information to start any process we undertake. And we in the GIS Team try our best to make our data spatial because everything a council deals with has a location..
- Whether it’s an inanimate object such as a dog bin or a bus stop or it’s
- The location of the residents or tourists their location is hugely important to the authority. So who uses GIS in the Borough of Poole?
- Well everybody does. We make sure that all staff have access to GIS via the web, as it’s imperative that location is used to help our understanding across everything that we do, and there’s a lot that we do with location
- Be it to help plan for potential disasters – using key datasets from across the authority to make the right decisions under time constraints. Be the finding the right site for evacuations, or identifying those most vulnerable to specific emergency situations -flooding will require a different response to a chemical leak.
- displaying socio-demographic information on a map.
- We also use Gis to help plan the routes of all of our waste /refuse trucks and some departments use it to plan site visits in the most efficient way
- We use the information to help make the right decision when it comes to cutting services – care home spend
- Or also identifying those who are undertaking fraudulent activity -such as avoidance of council tax or illegal construction of accommodation without the necessary planning permission.
- GIS is used to identify the private and publicly owned land, this helps the authority make the right action when it comes to fixing broken fencing/lampposts or clearing fly tipping or graffiti .
- GIS is heavily used by our transportation department to plan road alterations, define ownership ...
- It’s also used to maintain the Local Land and Property Gazetteer that at it’s most basic level, provides a spatial location for every road and building in the authority and this is used to help perform spatial searches
- GIS – Spatial Search but whilst the calculation is done spatially, it’s not also necessary that the result is displayed on a map, the data, the information is the biggest part of what we try to get out to people
- Textual result for planning search
- But all of this relies on sharing data and information, and the biggest thing we do in the GIS Team is work with connections in databases to get systems to talk to each other.
- By sharing information and joining datasets together we are able to build up the jigsaw of what is going on in our area, and how we, as an authority, can tackle any challenges that may arise, or rectify any inefficiencies that we discover.
- So what about the rest of the public sector? How do they use GIS?
- So the fire service use it to help plan exclusion zones for chemical spills or disasters. It can also be helped to identify crank callers be that from a mobile or phonebox.
- And the police? Well they use it to identify patterns and trends in criminal activity, to produce targeted operations to tackle specific crimes or even planning for counter-terrorism
- The ambulance service make significant use of location information to help identify the best place to base their fleet of vehicles dependent upon the time of day and the day of the week. This knowledge helps to drastically reduce the time it takes the first responders to get to an emergency.
- But what about the rest of the health service, well they are really starting to expand their integration with location Recent examples include Identifying areas of teenage pregnancy and comparing that to levels of deprivation, amount of sexual health education in the area to understand the success rate of intervention techniques Running a comparison on the proximity of fast food/takeaway establishments in relation to schools and the rates of childhood obesity Working with elevation data and known locations of slips and falls to prioritise the gritting of pavements across an area.
- And what of Central Government? Well where do you begin Of the 24 Ministerial and 23 Non Ministerial Departments, there isn’t one that doesn’t make use of GIS in some way. I will do my upmost to provide as comprehensive list as possible!
- So For ministerial Departments you have: DEFRA - Which works with Forestry Commission, Water Services Regulation Authority, Centre for Environment Fisheries and Aquaculture Science, Rural Payments Agency – this is huge for ensuring farmers get the right amount of money from Common Agricultural Policy Scheme TB outbreaks, foot and mouth have required extensive use of GIS to understand the risks and implications of decisions being made under significant pressure. Also workings with Natural England, Environment agency – Flooding is a clear usage of GIS – maps have been demanded on a daily basis by ministers during the recent flooding issues this winter All of the National Parks Department for Culture, Media and Sport – work with Royal Parks, Olympic Delivery Authority – ODA generated thousands of maps, had a team of cartographers working 24 hours a day in lead up to and during Olympic games. Also able to call on police helicopters to grab imagery from MPS helicopters. Department for Transport - Work with the Civil Aviation Authority, British Transport police, Highways Agency, High Speed 2 railway development – the number of maps being generated as residents and authorities are wanting to know where the HS2 link will go through England is incredibly large. Creation of first railway between Liverpool and Manchester created the need for national time and a timetable – although I don’t think they’ve stuck to one ever since! Department of Energy & Climate Change - Work with Committee on Climate change, Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, The coal Authority – who help with resolving cases on subsidence in property and land due to former coal mines and pits. Ministry of Defence – Work with UK Hydrographic Office amongst 29 agencies, but within the military. GIS use is extensive across all areas of the military. GPS first developed for military use, Ordnance survey came about as a need to map the defensive positions on the South Coast of England during the late 18th Century. So much geospatial technology has been from the military, even down to the use of Drones to now potentially deliver you your shopping from Amazon.
- I’m not going to go into loads of detail, but agian you can see within these groups you have Land Registry – who act as underwriters to government for over £1 trillion of land ownership. Without Land Registry, no bank would be able to provide a mortgage, as there would be no guarantor to who owns what land and property. Ordnance Survey National Crime Agency Government Actuary’s Department – Huge use of Gis as well as mathematics to understand the known and unknown risk of investment or not across a large number of areas.
- Other notable areas to mention include the Office for National Statistics, where geography is a key component is understanding about so much.
- And the Met Office who aside from telling us when we might see some shine also help, amongst plenty of other tings to use GIS to predict the areas most likely to suffer from potholes, provide long term weather forecasts for agriculture, notifiation of extreme weather conditions, freak incidents such as plume analysis for contaminants such as volcanic ash and work on understanding more about climate change.
- So what else is there? You’ve got the British Geological Survey – who require GIS to understand about everythign beow the surface, including identifying pockets of Shale Gas, predicting sites of Sinkholes and Groundwater Flooding
- National Trust – Conservation of footpaths and assets.
- Universities are a major source for research making use of GIS – some focus purely on the subject as a science with places like Manchester Met, Southampton, Bournemouth, Kingston Upon Thames and others, like the Jill Dando Institute or CASA at UCL have location as a fundamental attribute to underpin the studies they undertake.
- Farming, crop dusting, gps/computer tracking on tractors, geo-tagging cattle to monitor movements. The premise behind precision agriculture is simple; since terrains are not uniform in most of their dimensions such as soil composition, nutritional needs, crop yields, and pest/disease presence, then the traditional practice of treating them uniformly is hardly ideal. Precision agriculture intends to solve this problem by splitting each block into a grid of smaller plots of land and micromanaging them individually, or performing “site specific management” as we say in agriculture. Of course this is too big a task for people to do with since it requires collecting and analyzing millions of pieces of data. This is where technology comes into play with a variety of advanced technologies such as GPS systems, yield monitors, variable rate applicators, and geospatial statistical analysis software.
- The Transport industry relies heavily on accurate, up-to-date road networks as well as real time information on traffic flow and conditions. The logisitics of parcel delivery is massively reliant on such data to ensure that you can be provided with specific windows when your package will be delivered by. None of this informatiion could be worked out without knowing the spatial attributes of all of the variables involved.
- You have also got the private sector who make extensive use of GIS – Take your club card/nectar card every time you make a purchase analysts for these companies will be able to understand more about you, your shopping habits and the effectiveness of their advertising. By going through their database of customers, a store can target the exact age, gender and relative wealth of their customers to make sure their advertising is targeted t the right people at the right time. Saving them millions in advertising, whilst potentially maximising their profits with the provision of almost custom advertising. – Don’t be too surprised when this does come though! This same data is also used to help identify market growth, where is the best place to put a new Tesco, well you need to know your mrket, identify the most cost effecitve land, what is the infrastructure like, what other push pull factors are involved.. All needs location to help find the answer.
- Experian – Credit Checks – ACORN MOSAIC socio-demographic companies
- Insurance companies use location information to give you a more calculated quote, so they can base things more on probability than anything else so even if you have not claimed, if the postcode or neighbouring postcodes have made more claims – be that for traffic incidents or home insurance claims, your policy will also rise on the probability that you are living in an area of greater risk. Eventually the analysis will come down to household level, but some things, such as your proximity to major traffic junctions will never change. But all of this needs location to provide the information.
- Energy Companies – maintain their networks for water, gas or electricity.
- Energy Source Identification – Shale Gas, solar power, wind power,
- Google Bing, 4Square – Social Media – how important is location to these companies? Hugely important, do they employ vast numbers of people to ensure that location information is as accurate as possible, yes they do, do they have server buildings the size of multiple football pitches dedicated to delivering map requests to the world, yes yes they do. Personalised search results, local recommendations, understanding traffic patterns, predicting trends
- Charities
- What skills are employers looking for?
- So what does the future hold for GIS?