What's in it for ME! The case for Local Government.

I was asked a couple of weeks ago to list the benefits for local government to belong to ICIS and I thought it appropriate to post my response here. Many municipalities feel that membership is a one-way arrangement with lots of give but very little in return. Here's what I wrote including a bit on the challenges that we still face:

The Integrated Cadastral Information Society (ICIS) was originally created to build a single seamless cadastral fabric for the Province. The mission has since broadened to encompass the sharing of all kinds of spatial data (digital maps). As a result, there is an expanded interest in ICIS membership and an increased interest in improving the quality all types of cadastral data not just the cadastral fabric.

The question is often asked, what are the benefits to local government for participating in ICIS since many local governments are mainly creators and not consumers of spatial data? Here are some of the benefits we have come to see:

• Less interruption to local government business – Major utility companies, regional districts and other multi-jurisdictional organizations are members of ICIS. They now come to ICIS when they need local government data. This translates to fewer queries that local governments have to respond to that are not directly related to servicing the taxpayer.

• Emergency planning and response – Because ICIS data is accessible centrally and span jurisdictional boundaries it is the ideal place to acquire spatial data that is necessary for emergency planning and response. Like it or not, disasters often do not respect municipal boundaries such as chemical or pipeline spills.

• Grants – ICIS works hard to find additional money that can be given to local governments in the form of grants to improve spatial data and develop GIS capacity. There is currently $250,000 available to local governments under the CivicSpatial grant program with equivalent funding for 2008 and 2009.

• BC Assessment Dependence – BC Assessment depends on ICIS to support its central assessment database used to conduct local government tax assessments. BC Assessment takes this approach because it is efficient and more accurate than manual methods. By contributing data to ICIS local governments are reducing the cost of BC Assessment operations and improving the accuracy and stability of the roll which reduces appeals.

• Political Influence – Local governments have 5 of the 16 seats at the ICIS board table and, as a result, have a high degree of influence over Provincial and Utility members policy and direction as it relates to spatial data issues in BC. Currently 137 of the 187 local governments in BC are already ICIS members.

• One taxpayer – Participation in ICIS reduces redundancy across government levels and industry sectors thereby reducing the burden on the single taxpayer. Efficient exchange of information that is common to everyone benefits everyone.

As ICIS continues to mature we face many challenges that we continue to work on including:

• Differing business needs amongst partners – It’s extremely hard to build one product or service that meets the needs of everyone. ICIS, like any other large organization, faces challenges in meeting everyone’s needs and expectations.

• Solid commitment from partners – ICIS has enjoyed tremendous support from its member groups but that support is often tempered. A cooperative organization like ICIS needs 100% commitment to the vision of sharing.

• Changing technology – Every organization in the world is faced with rapid technological change. ICIS is no different and must find ways creative ways to adapt to technological change without impacting our vision.

• Data standards – Open sharing of data requires some level of standardization. Developing standards and implementing them is a challenging undertaking at its best but is necessary to achieve useable and shareable data.

Given our challenges, ICIS is gaining a world-wide reputation in inter-agency cooperation and goodwill. ICIS continues to prove the power of partnerships that will carry us well into the future.

Multi-headed Dragons - Part III

In my last two postings I dealt with the Provincial and local government relationships within the ICIS family. In this posting I will take a look at the utility companies - the final group of the founding ICIS members.

To a large extent, I have found utility companies the easiest to deal with in terms of their wants and needs. That's not to say that there are no issues but simply that their issues are often much easier to resolve than those within local government and between local government and the Province.

Now, before I go further, I should also note that the utility companies do pay the majority of the bills that keep ICIS going (including my own compensation) so I'll state up front that my glowing view of utilities is perhaps tainted. Having said that, here are my thoughts. . .

The utility companies business aligns nicely with that of local government. Their needs for information are almost identical (in fact, a local government operates its infrastructure as a utility). The only major differences between the two is that utility company interests generally span jurisdictional boundaries (like the Province) and they are in business to make money (the Province and local government are not. . . well, not supposed to be anyway).

The business rationale for utilities to participate in ICIS is primarily to save time (not have to go to 200 different agencies for data) which, in turn, saves money. If utility companies saw no return for their investment they would not participate. It's as simple as that.

There are two interesting rub-points with respect to the utility members however. First, is the issue of positional accuracy of the utility infrastructure in relation to local government data. In some areas utility data was not mapped in relation to local government data so sharing becomes problematic. If the pipes don't line up with local government rights-of-way then the data becomes of little use to a local government for the purpose of locating foreign (other utilities other than the municipality) services. In this situation there is little motivation on the part of the utility to move its data since, like local governments, the data meets their own internal business needs. Moving the data would cost money providing little return to the utility's business operations. The result is some tension between some local government and some utility members. Doubly interesting is that this problem works the other way as well. Some local governments have poor positionally accurate data yet still insist on utility companies to provide accurate information.

The second rub-point with respect to the utility members is competition. When ICIS was originally formed the founding utility members were largely non-competitive amongst each other. That is, there was one gas company, one hydro company, one telephone company and one cable company. Now, as new utility companies want to join ICIS and existing members are providing services similar to other members (Shaw and Telus for phone service for example) there becomes some discomfort about sharing infrastructure data between these other members. It somewhat surprises me that, for the most part, this has caused little problem within the ICIS family. I find it hard to imagine that this sort of arrangement could work in the United States where corporate data security seems of much higher importance. In the end, it is the general cooperative nature that we see at ICIS that has got us this far. It's quite remarkable and quite Canadian!

Multi-headed Dragons - Part II

In my previous post I talked about how the Provincial government handles coming up with a common policy direction by being process driven and how problematic this can be within the ICIS family. I also noted that the Provincial government is a complex creature that requires a large degree of process to actually get anything done - all be it slowly. In the end, the Provincial government does have some mechanism to speak with one voice - this is not the case for local government.

Notwithstanding the Union of BC Municipalities which is supposed to be the coordinated voice of local government in BC, rare is it that local governments can work out a process to agree on policy direction. The autonomous nature of local government means often that 187 (and counting) local governments will yield 187 different opinions on how an issue should be handled.

There is a real practical impact to ICIS with respect to the diversity of approaches from local government. ICIS, being a data sharing organization, functions best when the data it receives is standardized. Standardized data fits with other data and is easily shareable between different agencies. Since the primary data collection and maintenance agency for cadastral data in BC are municipalities and there are no standards for mapping this data by local governments you end up with potentially 187 different mapping standards.

The tragedy, from a data sharing perspective, is that there is no real business need for a local government to have a mapping standard that satisfies any other need than for its own purposes. Consequently, any effort to standardize data by an outside agency would be met with skepticism at best or outright condemnation by a local government. In fact, this rational has been used by local governments for not participating in ICIS in the first place: "if it doesn't benefit me why would I play?"

The lack of process on the part of local government is frustrating, to say the least, from a Provincial Government perspective. Their needs span jurisdictional boundaries and require a high degree of integration to function. This is difficult, if not impossible, to achieve without a high degree of process and standardization that is often not present in local government other than the very large cities (and even they are not consistent). Is it any wonder that the Province and local governments often find it hard to relate to one another.

Up next. . . the utility companies.

Multi-headed Dragons - Part I

When I stop and think about the structure of ICIS with its wide ranging membership it always amazes me that we've managed to get as far as we have.

The biggest challenge that ICIS has always faced is the dichotomy of needs and views between the Provincial and Local governments. The Province, itself, is a confederation of differing ministerial needs and wants that must, somehow, be rendered to a single policy direction that can be voiced at the ICIS Board table. To do this, the Province relies on process to determine direction and this, by necessity, results in time and money. When forced to make decisions that have not had the luxury of due process, single personalities within the Province are forced to make decisions on-the-fly. These decisions can, quite often, run counter to what the resulting process might finally reveal. An outsider then receives a mixed message and mistrust develops.

Personalities can play a role here in how severe the mistrust takes hold but it has been my experience that no matter how well intentioned a Provincial decision maker might be they will, at some point, be caught out of sync with the process. Ultimately they are at the whim of the political engine that drives them and once you are at that level logic and reasoning often go out the window.

Next up, the local government conundrum.

The Value of Cooperation

• Three Values of ICIS Pete Flagg July 2007-07-24
  
  This is intended as the first in a series of personal perspectives on the Integrated Cadastral Information Society, by Pete Flagg, currently the General Manager of ICIS. The three perspectives deal with the value of the society to its individual members and member classes and significantly to our SOCIETY at large.
  
  Three distinct but related values presented to members by the society are:
  
  · The Value of Cooperation;
  
  · The Value of Data Access Convenience;
  
  · The Value of Discovery.
  
  
  The VALUE of Cooperation
  
  When I became General Manager of the Integrated Cadastral Information Society (ICIS) in the summer of 2005, I was given six months and explicit direction by the board members who hired me to “make it do something”, or to tell them if it was not going to work and “find a place to bury it”. At that time there was intense frustration on the board of directors with three particular issues:
  · the lack of progress in building an Integrated Cadastral Fabric (ICF) – a comprehensive and accurate consolidated fabric of the private sector and crown parcels in the province;
  · the lack of a viable maintenance framework for the ICF where it had been created, and
  · unresolved dissonance over the “ownership” of the data.
  
  These issues were undermining the commitment to the society by the paying stakeholders – the provincial government and major utilities. The chronic distrust between many local governments regarding the provincial government’s motivations surrounding the collection of local government data, added to the general sense of malaise and lack of commitment to the society’s future.
  
  The fact that the society is still going after two years is evidence that it has succeeded in addressing, if not completely resolving, the issues of that time. In two years, the society has
  · tripled the number of parcels available from local governments via its on-line web- map service,
  · doubled its annual revenues
  · secured the copyright to the ICF
  · increased the available current ICF parcels over 5 times
  · quadrupled the available Assessment Fabric parcels
  · opened its doors to “associate members” such as port authorities, health authorities, environmental groups, and private sector companies.
  
  But it strikes me that the real values of the society are still overlooked or undervalued by its participants. The emphasis on the creation of “one fabric” that suits all stakeholders has and continues to distract stakeholders from one of the most valuable aspects of the society –the co-operation that the society requires from its members to continue to exist.
  
  Why do non-profit societies come into being? Why do associations form? Why do new companies appear in the private sector and why are new programs created by the public sector? All of these organizations and processes are created in our broader “Society” to address a real or perceived need. Whether it’s the private sector or public sector, a group of like –minded people assemble with the means to create an organization that functions to address what they believe is an unmet need in industry or among citizens or an interest group of some kind.
  
  The evidence of ICIS’s recent success that I refer to above, to me are simply the outcomes of the society’s true and most valuable function – to serve as the conduit for cooperation among the various sectors of our society. The society would not exist if this aspect of cooperation – specifically of sharing spatial data for the benefit of the economy and citizens – were being adequately performed by either of the separate sectors that make up the society’s founding member classes – the provincial government Ministries and Crown Corporations, the Local Governments, and the major Utility providers in the province. If the tremendous success of Google Earth were not indication enough, the society’s growth in income, membership, available data and services, is simply indicative that the need to analyze information spatially was there a few years ago and is still growing. The society’s initial aim to create a single integrated or consolidated parcel fabric for the province was only ONE anecdotal example of that larger need.
  
  ICIS provides these three primary sectors of society, and industry at large (represented by the growing numbers of associate members), with an ongoing forum that operates to negotiate sharing the primary resource in the information age – information. The ongoing existence of ICIS is evidence of the inherent need of all sectors of society to cooperate with the use of the still emerging information resource.
  
  Although we like to advertise ourselves as being in the “information age”, there are still many people who don’t consider primary data sets as being a part of the “basic infrastructure” of current society. We also tend to overlook or not quite understand what is meant by “co-operation”. Some ICIS members for example, when required to “co-operate” with the other member classes, feel that their autonomy, their control over some aspect of their life, profession, or in this case, professional objectives are being “co-opted” by other external forces.
  
  But the meaning of “co-operation” in our case is to Co – Operate – that is, to “jointly operate” a function. Joint operation does not necessarily require you to subvert your objectives or compromise them, rather to achieve them jointly with other stakeholders, who have similar or even the same objectives and aims. To operate jointly is to recognize that any one group of stakeholders does not have the means to achieve the end alone – or at least not without a cost (resources, dollars, time, skills, thoughtware,) that cannot be justified by any one individual sector.
  
  If we view the desire to create an ICF not as the primary aim of the society but as a symptom – one example of anecdotal evidence of what is going in Society - then we can better understand the underlying value of ICIS as a reflection of Society. To do that, it may help to understand or perceive Society itself as a complex organism. If we understand or perceive Society as a “complex system” or as a parallel to a complex organism – such as a multi-celled organism, there are insights from the newer sciences and mathematics of complexity and uncertainty, and even biology, which can provide insights to why ICIS exists in our Society and what function it serves.
  
  Uri Merry, in Coping with Uncertainty: Insights from the New Sciences of Chaos, Self-organization and Complexity, (1995) describes Self-organization of complex systems that evolve but still maintain their own integrity as a system. “The system itself, and not some outside force restructures itself into a completely new order and creates the form of its own future. Self organization is a process of spontaneous structuration, of self-determination and self-renewal. It is the ordering principle that guides the…development of all complex systems including…social structures. …In self-organization, systems spontaneously change into more elaborate forms. The new forms they take are more complex, they entail cooperative behavior and global coherence and their final forms are unpredictable.”
  
  The component parts self-organize into something that is greater than the sum of its parts in terms of capability, awareness, creativity and, most especially – adaptability to changing scenarios. It is worth remembering that one of the factors contributing to the original formation of ICIS was the inconsistency of one of the basic layers of spatial data in society – the cadastral or land parcel fabric. The inconsistent access to that data required all founding members to manage multiple data sharing legal agreements, and manage inconsistent data sets and technical standards. The desire for consistency led to the formation of an “agent” that it was hoped would at least encourage consistency, where none of the component agents had the ability to enforce one. “Somehow, by constantly seeking mutual accommodation and self-consistency, groups of agents manage to transcend themselves and become something more” (Waldrop, 1992).
  
  Merry and others suggests human society itself is best described as a “far-from-equilibrium” system, in which change is constant, and in which new forms are always emerging. “The social systems – nation states, institutions, organizations…that humans create to organize their lives, need to constantly cooperate and coordinate their actions and change them according to changed circumstances. These systems and their components must regularly adjust their behavior to that of their changing environment. The only way social systems can continue to exist under these circumstances is behavior based on far-from-equilibrium structures”. (Merry). Systems exhibiting these characteristics of constant change reach a crisis point or “bi-furcation point” where they either dissolve entirely or restructure into a more complex system or organism. However, the precise nature of the new organization or system cannot be predicted.
  
  This point is crucial for the participants of ICIS, board members, and for organization leaders and consultants to understand. “There are limits to both predicting and controlling what will happen to nations, organizations… Design and guidance to some degree appear to be possible, but not control. It is impossible to predict precisely when a transformation will take place and what exact form it will take” (Merry). This latter point is especially relevant to the member classes of ICIS, where one or the other often attempts to “control” the direction of the society, its scope of services, data and the scope of solutions it offers to other members. Influence is both possible and even expected, but control is very difficult and ultimately contrary to the value the society brings to all its member classes. One member class controlling the direction and “form” of the society undermines the very creativity and adaptability that is the society’s strength. “Complex adaptive systems have the capability to create perpetual novelty”. (Merry)
  
  Another reason for the original formation of ICIS and one that I believe is becoming an even stronger contributor to its need for continuance, is simply the awareness – or lack of it – among the component members of the society, as to the activity, standards, uses and analyses being done with spatial data outside their group that affects them internally. Being “at the table” has allowed local governments and utilities to be aware of provincial government motivations and actions in seeking a more defined approach to collecting, managing and distributing spatial data. Provincial government members become aware of the interest and capability of the private sector or local governments in partnering in new spatial data initiatives. Being “at the table” provides more intelligence than either member class would have if they were not participating.
  
  Similarly a complex organism seeks information about its environment as a means of survival. The more “intelligence” gathered – the more accurate that intelligence is – the better chance the organism has of adapting to its environment. ICIS as a reflection of a broader Society, functions to provide its component member classes with increasing intelligence or awareness of what the other members are doing, that could not necessarily be replicated by any of those component members acting alone. The desire to know “what the other guys are doing” is not altruistic – it is survival-based. “The more awareness an organism has of its environment, the better its chances of survival.” (Bruce Lipton, The Biology of Belief, 2005).
  
  This “greater awareness” that all stakeholders seek and need, is not as easily accomplished in pre-existing hierarchical or autocratic relationships and organizations, especially when the availability and structure of information is constantly growing and changing. Leading social scientists and management consultants such as Toffler, Nesbitt, Hammer and others for the past decade and more have been saying that the trends are away from hierarchical organizations to networks, away from independent organizations to interdependence, away from unilateral and self-limiting mandates, to associations and “fuzzy” edges of organization scope and authority. (Where does ICIS “end” and the provincial government’s mapping function “begin”, when the latter is a member of the former?).
  
  Just look at Michael Hammer’s latest book on business in the customer-driven economy – whole chapters are devoted to these topics: “Create Order Where Chaos Reigns: Systematize Creativity, Manage Without Structure, Knock Down Your Outer Walls – Collaborate Wherever You Can, and his final chapter, Prepare for a Future You Cannot Predict – Institutionalize a Capacity for Change”. This is exactly what ICIS provides the Provincial Government and other founding members – an institution that negotiates new information sharing with the other sectors of society as needed – and the need continues to be both urgent and important, to put it in Steven Covey’s famous matrix.
  
  “Societies with a greater and faster ability to acquire knowledge and information advance more and outstrip other societies” (Merry). The greater awareness that ICIS stakeholders have of each other’s activities with spatial data via their participation in the society, is a survival strategy for each of the component member classes in the still-emerging information age. So, the greatest value of the society for its founding member classes, and growing number of associate members, is the very cooperation that is required for the society to exist. Through that cooperation, greater resources and greater awareness and greater adaptability is available to cope with a still emerging and wildly changing information economy.
  
  To sum up:
  
  - The development of Integrated Cadastral Fabric, rather than the central objective of ICIS, should be taken as a symbolic predictor that the larger Society is seeking a means of sharing spatial data for the benefit of all stakeholders in that Society. The precise means to do that does not exist effectively with previous or existing institutions.
  - The founding member classes of ICIS have intrinsically recognized they don’t have the means in their pre-defined “stable” processes and mandates to optimize all of the spatial data resources, skills, funds and technology available to them, and thus have “re-formed” (self-organized) themselves into a new, more complex organization, that collectively has the means to achieve that optimization.
  - The new organization, ICIS, both requires and exhibits a higher level of collaboration, co-operation (joint operation) and global coherence than the component organizations exhibited and demanded before the new organization was formed. The more co-operation and trust there is “around the table” of ICIS, the greater the achievement and effectiveness of the society in responding to emerging and changing scenarios.
  - The new “self-organized” organization can be “influenced” by its components (the member classes) but not discretely “controlled” by any one of them. Its final form has not been established and cannot be predicted.
  - The new organization provides its discrete member classes with a collective “awareness” that is greater than any of those member components have on their own – in this case about the specific spatial data attributes, resources and activity of Society at large, by “being at the table” with their fellow members and constantly negotiating new and broader sets of data and terms for data sharing.
  - Finally, aside from this greater shared awareness, the other crucial underlying value of the society is that it provides its member components with flexibility and adaptability, a capacity for change, that is greater collectively than the components can be on their own, to the emerging opportunities and pressures associated with spatial analysis of ANY data.
  
  The cooperation required for ongoing negotiation of new data sets, more data, broader membership and evolving terms of data use and analysis, IS the primary value of the society – not the delivery of any one specific technology or thematic data layer.
  
  The final form of ICIS and of these negotiations may never appear – as the “self-organization” principle and dynamics of far-from-equilibrium systems are that they do NOT return to regular states, never repeat themselves exactly and are non-linear in their evolution. Complex systems are most adaptive “at the edge of chaos”. (Merry) ICIS, reflecting the need of Society to share a constantly emerging spatial information resource, will thus continue to change and evolve its governance, funding, membership, data and technology services.
  
  
  
  
  References:
  
  Merry, Uri Coping with Uncertainty: Insights from the New Sciences of Chaos, Self-Organization and Complexity, Westport Connecticut: Praeger Publishers, 1995
  
  Waldrop, W.Mitchell. Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos, New York: Simon & Shuster, 1992
  
  Toffler, Alvin. The Power Shift, . New York: Bantam Books, 1991.
  
  Hammer, Michael. Agenda, 2007
  
  

Welcome to ICIS Think!

In the words of Alex Miller, founder and owner of ESRI Canada "What ICIS is doing and how it is doing it is unique in Canada and probably all of North America."

With that we have always recognized the challenges we face in trying to bring together vastly different organizations to achieve the common objective of building a single cadastral fabric for B.C. and sharing it and other spatial data. Different views, business requirements and interests come together at ICIS to form something bigger than the individual parts. The fact that we have been around for over five years speaks to the core commitment to our mission around the ICIS table.

The nature of such a collaborative effort has and continues to have its challenges. ICIS in many respects is a federation like Canada and thus experiences many of the challenges in maintaining a cooperative relationship that we are all familiar with on the national stage. Since an appreciation and understanding of different points of view is vital to any federation we feel it is important to have a venue where perspectives and views can be shared with the ICIS community.

To this end we have created ICIS Think - a blog for ICIS written by Pete Flagg, General Manager of ICIS and Steven Garner, former Board member and now Local Government Membership Coordinator for ICIS. The views expressed here are not the official views of the ICIS Board. They provide a perspective from the trenches with the goal to enlighten others about the challenges we face and, perhaps more importantly, provide a perspective on the relationships within ICIS. In the end, we trust that open and honest dialogue will provide the opportunity to improve relationships and thus ICIS itself.