Client: City of Pullman
Location: Pullman, Washington

Our team conducted a GIS needs assessment for the City of Pullman to objectively evaluate their current use of GIS, and provide recommendations for optimizing their use of GIS in the future. We conducted a series of on-site interviews with city staff to better understand how they were currently implementing GIS and their ultimate usage goals. The assessment resulted in a three-year road map for the city that included over 20 prioritized recommendations.

We evaluated:

• Short and long-term goals and objectives
• Resources and responsibilities of city staff
• Use of software
• Day-to-day workflow within and across departments
• Spatial data repositories
• Hardware, server, and network resources and mobile devices

We identified:

• Spatial data repositories
• Methods for transferring institutional knowledge
• Mechanisms to allow better access to city maintained data sets
• Opportunities for increased ROI, especially in the areas of process automation and capacity building

We also recommended the development of particular tools and apps, estimated staff capacity needs for a more robust GIS program, and pinpointed areas where there would be a large ROI if a more robust program was implemented. Over-all, the GIS needs assessment allowed us to identify the steps that needed to be taken to get the city of Pullman where they wanted to be with GIS.