Geographic information systems (GIS) helps information make sense.
How
Locate your service providers, your clients, and places of interest on a map. Then investigate the relationships between them and their surroundings, guide others to make informed choices; and build intelligence about how location affects the products and services you deliver.
Specifically,
Planning . Dynamic maps that use demographic data enable you to really know your community. E.g. by knowing where highly vulnerable families live and overlaying these locations with other factors, you can predict need and plan response.
Finding . Where is it? How close? How far? What's nearby? How many within a 5km "buffer"? GIS provides easy visual answers.
Routing . With less time to spend with clients and gas prices climbing, it's easy to develop a compelling business case for a GIS. GIS tools automate your answers and provide optimal routes with time windows and special needs accommodations.
Tracking . If you need to know where a child or your field workers are, GIS mobile technology makes that easy and effective - even through a cell phone and online.
Integrating . Integrate information through geography and explore relationships that would never be apparent in a report, graph, or spreadsheet. Make your data smarter.
Geocoding : Clients, service providers, places of interest. Everything with an address can be mapped. Doing so ensures the accuracy of the address, and gives you a "map layer" of those clients, and service providers, and points of interest against which any number of systems and other data can be related.
WHY
When any new technology is introduced within an organization, the benefits need to be compelling. Here's a few.
a) Increase child safety and security. Knowing where the child is or the areas of potential problems are can mean a great deal in ensuring safety and security is optimized.
b) Build understanding and communicate with confidence. Maps communicate. They help you tell your story to any audience - young and old alike.
c) Reduce liability. Knowing and showing where and when an event takes place adds further assurance to your decisions and programs.
d) Predict the future! OK, nobody really knows what tomorrow may bring, but a GIS can monitor trends and help you forecast the effects of changing demographics and public policy.
e) Increase program funding. If your programs aren't getting the recognition and funding they deserve, it may be because the needs, objectives and benefits aren't clearly understood. By building understanding and credibility, you are in a better position to elevate your programs above the rest.
f) Measure program effectiveness. Indicator / thematic mapping is a common use of a GIS, enabling you to put performance criteria, benchmarks, and results on a map or series of maps. In fact, doing so will often show gaps in a program's effectiveness or areas of great success that may not otherwise have been readily apparent. In summary,
Clear and useful information supports effective management decisions.
With a map-based inventory of services, demographic profiles, and community zoning, administrators can see the different characteristics and provide services that best reflect the needs of that community.
Knowing the movement and flow of clients to and from various community services helps ensure the current services in a given community are adequate and appropriate for the population.
Policy makers measure the performance and quality improvement by geographic locations.
Operationally, GIS enables practical time and money-saving benefits like routing and network optimization.
We welcome an opportunity to talk to you about "bringing your data to life" - through GIS.
Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc. (ESRI) develops the world's leading GIS software used by hundreds of thousands of organizations. Since 1984, ESRI Canada has dedicated itself to providing superior products, outstanding client support, and contributing technical knowledge, people and expertise to the collection, analysis and communication of geographic information. ESRI Canada has GIS solutions to meet the needs of any-sized solution-from mobile to server and web.
A successful GIS is more than software; it also requires people who can develop and support the system. ESRI Canada's GIS professionals help you take full advantage of your GIS through our training and consulting services.
If you are interested in having GIS technologies support your programs and services, or would like more information, please contact:
Robert Delorme Account Manager Health & Human Services ESRI Canada Phone: 416-386-6418 Fax: 416-441-2106 Email: rdelorme@esricanada.com
