Speech by Sue Gordon to the ESRI User Conference

LINZ General Manager Strategic Development and Support, Sue Gordon, spoke at the ESRI user conference in Wellington on 9 November.

Sue spoke about LINZ's focus and aims for geospatial information, what LINZ has done in the past year, what we are doing now, and the need to work collaboratively across the geospatial sector to achieve common goals.

A summary of Sue's speech is provided below, and you can download a copy of the accompanying presentation (PDF 410KB).

Summary of Sue Gordon ’s speech to the ESRI user conference

Thank you for the introduction and for inviting me to speak today. The conference theme of past, present and future fits well with what I’d like to talk this morning – what LINZ has been doing since our chief executive, Colin MacDonald, spoke to you last year, what we’re currently doing, and where we’re heading.

As the General Manager of Strategic Development and Support at LINZ, I am responsible for the New Zealand Geospatial Office and for LINZ’s leadership role in the New Zealand Geospatial Strategy.

What's happened since last year's conference?

Last year, Colin MacDonald talked to you about the work LINZ had done in 2009 and what we would be working on in 2010. The three things he focused on were:

• LINZ’s strategic direction is now closely aligned with federated geospatial information
• LINZ is acting in this area and some of the relevant activities we had done and were doing
• Planning and consulting were underway for further actions.

We’ve made even more progress over the last year.

We have further refined our strategic direction, with one of our outcomes being even more clearly stated as “available, accessible and shared geospatial information”, and a very clear goal for LINZ to develop our own geospatial centre of excellence and make our data more widely available and more easy to access (eg the LINZ Data Service project).

We have a clear work programme under the NZ Geospatial Strategy and Kevin Sweeney commenced as the Geospatial Custodian at the start of this year.

I’ll talk more about all these things this morning.

What I'm going to talk about

I’m going to talk about our focus and aims for geospatial information, what we’ve been focusing this year and what our focus will be over the next year.

I’m also interested in your views on whether we are focusing on the right things – to get us to a point where NZ’s geospatial information is ‘unlocked’ and its potential realised.

LINZ focus

LINZ’s focus for geospatial information has two clear areas of emphasis:

• Lead New Zealand’s geospatial information strategy
• Develop a geospatial centre of excellence by building on our core technical functions

I’ll talk more about these two areas of focus in turn.

Leading New Zealand's geospatial information strategy

Our role here is as the government’s coordinating agency for geospatial information strategy and policy.

The Geospatial Strategy is not an end-in-itself. It is about leading a dynamic and networked process.

Our focus is to:

• Continue to ensure the governance structures for the strategy are best fit and functioning well (the chief executive’s group led by Colin MacDonald and the steering group led by Kevin Sweeny)
• Shift resources to support SDI framework via NZGO
• Establish framework fundamental data that better supports core government functions
• Improve access to existing geospatial data across government
• Strengthen a research and capability building agenda with industry and academia
• Coordination and communication to build further momentum and consistency across sectors
• Align this work with emerging ICT directions – including the open data and information re-use agenda

Spatial data infrastructure

I’d like to touch on one of these areas of focus in a bit more detail – the SDI framework. The essence of our approach to a New Zealand spatial data infrastructure is one where:

1. The SDI is a framework that facilitates connections between providers and users of geospatial information.
2. The framework is an overarching concept within which agencies can develop conventions, protocols and an architecture to facilitate open geospatial data (across government in the first place, but ultimately across the geospatial community).
3. It facilitates business at a national level – by:
   • Reducing costs – reduced friction between provision and use
   • Improving decision making – reduced latency between edit and use
   • Improving efficiency – as gaps in data and potential enhancements are better understood
   It benefits:
4. Each program of work that participates – does so incrementally – and the NZ economy benefits substantially – over time
5. The process is dynamic – it links participants with significant levels of policy and financial autonomy.
6. The interventions are dynamic - this is especially so because data technology will continue to exceed the capacity and capability of systems to manage either the technology or the data. For example, the governance work is not standard or static. It is an active, intervention designed to mitigate significant risks.
7. This work is an essential outcome of:
   • NZ Geospatial Strategy
   • LINZ Geospatial Leadership - LINZ as an operational agency must be at the forefront of SDI implementation… otherwise LINZ’s strategic leadership will be questioned.
8. We have developed the framework based on an internationally recognised approach. And we are aligning this with geospatial marketplace work being undertaken across Australasia by the Australia NZ Land Information Council (ANZLIC).

What success will look like

So what will success look like in this first area of leading New Zealand’s geospatial information strategy?

In the first year (current), we are focused on establishing LINZ’s role more formally, generating greater awareness of the power and potential of geospatial information, and more firmly establishing links and co-ordination between government, industry and academia.

In the second year (2011/12), we aim to have New Zealand’s geospatial information more available, accessible and being re-used for business purposes. We also want the fundamental datasets with the greatest socio-economic impact for New Zealand to be evolving to maximise their use and impact. This includes LINZ’s own datasets.

By year three, we want to be in a position where the focus is on leverage – where we have smarter use of geospatial information to positively enhance New Zealand’s productive capacity, where New Zealand is recognised globally as a thought leader in geospatial strategy and where government agencies with geospatial information publish that information in accordance with agreed access standards.

Developing a geospatial centre of excellence

Turning now to our second area of focus – to develop a LINZ centre of excellence in geospatial information – our role here is to ‘walk the talk’, to be an exemplar of geospatial information management.

Our focus is to:

• Continue to implement a data improvement programme
• Improve access to existing data as part of SDI framework (eg the LINZ Data Service project)
• Align data management with goals and principles of geospatial strategy
• Develop a clear 10-15 year vision for topography, hydrography and geodesy – that is continually refreshed
• Implement our customer management strategy – across LINZ.

What success will look like

And what will success look like in this second area?

Again, looking at a three year view, in year one, we want to have widespread internal understanding of, and agreement to, the work to make LINZ’s data more accessible. We want to have a clear long-term vision for the areas of topography, hydrography and geodesy. And we want to have made significant progress towards implementing our refreshed customer strategy, which recognises a much broader range of customers as key to LINZ than LINZ has historically focused on.

In year two, we want LINZ’s core geospatial services to be aligned with the goals and principles of the geospatial strategy and to have completed the implementation of our customer management strategy. This, we hope, will lead to people like you and others regarding LINZ as a high performing agency.

And in year three, we aim to have LINZ’s geospatial services recognised as the best of their kind and to have demonstrably improved the experience of our customers, with an optimised cost to serve.

What have we done so far?

We have been building the foundations for our leadership role in the geospatial arena.

In this foundational phase we have made a number of deliberate choices to:

1. Position LINZ to unleash the power of geospatial information (externally – at a national level and internally with our own data)
2. Establish sound governance for the geospatial strategy – it is critical to establish a strong platform to connect a dispersed, fragmented set of participants
3. Establish a strategic framework for New Zealand’s Spatial Data Infrastructure (as I’ve already outlined). We need a sustainable approach that facilitates open geospatial data while recognising that many autonomous participants need to be connected and guided
4. Engage strategically to raise awareness and create momentum – participation and collaboration is critical to what we are trying to achieve.

New Zealand Geospatial Office Work Programme

So what’s more specifically on the work programme for the NZ Geospatial Office? This slide shows a simplified version of the NZGO work programme.

I don’t propose to go into detail here as Kevin Sweeney will talk more about this work programme in his presentation later on but this diagram links together the higher level strategy (here, a LINZ Key Initiative and Government priority for LINZ) to operational realm/projects.

We have developed an organising concept of streams of work to facilitate that link.

There are eight streams of work: the first four correspond directly to the four key strategic goals in the NZ Geospatial Strategy (slightly reworded). The other four support the first four as well as addressing identified barriers.

What else is going on across government?

I also thought it worthwhile to mention what other work is going on across government that is linked to or supports our geospatial goals.

The Natural Resources Sector Network is a network of government agencies that are involved in New Zealand’s natural resources sector: there are the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (MAF), the Department of Conservation (DOC), the Ministry of Economic Development (MED), Te Puni Kokiri (TPK), the Ministry of Fisheries, the Ministry for the Environment (MfE), the Treasury and the State Services Commission (SSC) from a cross-government perspective, and, of course, LINZ. These agencies have made a commitment to progressing the availability and accessibility of geospatial information.

It also worth mentioning the work on open data. There is growing momentum across government to maximise the use and re-use of non-personal government-held information. This work covers a range of areas from pricing and licensing to other information policy frameworks to support open data. Colin MacDonald is the chair of the chief executives’ group leading this work.

Will this get us there?

Now we come to the crunch question. Will what I’ve outlined this morning get us there? What do you, the geospatial sector, need to do? What else might LINZ need to do?

LINZ is keen to engage with you on these questions and they are perhaps questions you can consider as you go through this conference.

To do that, it is of course important to acknowledge what you are doing. I am aware of some of this but we might not have the full picture.

SIBA has a work programme focused on three key areas:

• Improving sector-wide capability and capacity
• Increasing awareness of the value of spatial information
• Encouraging government to enhance the top spatial reference sets and make them more widely available

You can see these align well with what I’ve outlined as LINZ’s and wider government focus; this mutual reinforcement I believe will be hugely beneficial to us all.

What else is underway that we might not be aware of? I’d like to invite you to share your knowledge and ideas with us.

A challenge

Finally, I’d like to acknowledge that what we’re all aiming for is not a small challenge. And we are making progress – so thanks to you for the work you’ve done and the support you’ve shown for what we’re trying to achieve. It’s this collective effort that will make the difference and get us there.

Thank you for your time.