2025 WA GIS Conference

Over the past year, the King County GIS Center embarked on a sizeable effort to overhaul publishing, distribution, and data access for the county’s internal enterprise GIS data library. Instead of directly connecting to an on-prem enterprise geodatabase, users will now access hosted feature services through ArcGIS Online, allowing for faster access and better scalability. To facilitate the migration, the King County GIS Center developed a suite of tools including a robust ETL process, renewed Spatial Data Catalog, metadata cleanup effort, new ArcGIS Pro Add-In, and educational content on a Hub site. Join us as we dive into data discoverability, distribution, and tools to make it easier for our users to find the data they need.

Topics include:

• Overview – Transitioning users from a custom data access plug-in in ArcMap to using web services in ArcGIS Pro.

• ETL and more – Get a peek into our ETL process, and the added functionality around categorizing, tagging, and sharing of data.

• Metadata cleanup – How the Enterprise Data Modernization project daylighted metadata problems and how we addressed them.

• Spatial Data Catalog – A new application to search for King County data, allows for more robust searchability than built-in ArcGIS Online tools. Designed to be as accessible as possible.

• Add-In and educational content – Instead of creating custom tools for data access within -ArcGIS Pro, we provide education to our users on how to access the data they are familiar with.

Why is data so important for modern government and why is there a need for better data sharing? This presentation will focus on the state’s goals and newly released Enterprise Data Strategy to create a unified data ecosystem to help state agencies make better decisions. Joanne will walk through examples of how we can combine spatial and non-spatial data to improve efficiency and services. Partnerships, pathways and people help make that magic happen and Joanne will focus on what we as a GIS community can do to help accomplish these goals.

Prior to GIS technology Washington Department of Health (WADOH) operated with limited ability to access, search, or share authoritative geospatial data. This made collective and collaborative workflows difficult, as processes are siloed, primarily paper-based, and manual. Moving to a web-based, Enterprise GIS platform supported WADOH’s Data Modernization Initiative and empowered agency staff to create and share content more effectively.

Using configurable solutions available in our Enterprise GIS platform (such as Esri’s Experience Builder, Dashboards, and Survey123) and other existing technical solutions (such as Power Automate Flow) we can streamline common workflows and create systems that are connected, adaptable, and sustainable. During this session, Tonya will share WADOH’s modernization story and examples of how GIS is helping transform public health workflows.

Washington State Hydrography Dataset (WASHD) program in the Department of Ecology is leading a project to remap the hydrography of Washington State to support the new 3D Hydrography Program led by USGS. This dataset will replace the old National Hydrography Dataset with a more accurate and modern alternative for hydrography analysis and cartography. This presentation will provide an update on the status of this remapping and regions that WASHD hopes to map in the next year. We will also review how we plan to manage changes in the hydrography data structure to meet the needs of Washington state hydrography Stakeholders. While mapping hydrography appeared to be a simple straightforward process, the project quickly became complicated. We will demonstrate our Project Management framework, tools and practices that have helped WASHD define objectives and goals, documenting important decisions and issues, and managed schedules. By leveraging project management, we enhanced communication both within our team and with our numerous stakeholders, leadership, and GIS subject matter experts. We will leave time to answer questions both about the hydrography mapping and project management.

The City of Tacoma has been using distributed collaborations to share data between Enterprise portal and ArcGIS Online since 2022. Progress has not been linear: there have been many challenges. We will share how our distributed collaborations are set up, lessons learned along the way, and tips and tricks to help you on your own distributed collaboration journey.

This presentation outlines the results of the Seattle 2024 GIS Return on Investment (ROI) Study. This study was a partnership between GIS Management Consulting Services of Edmonds and four key leaders of Seattle GIS.

The study was based on the GIS ROI methodology developed by Prof. Richard Zerbe of the UW Evans School of Public Administration. The study approach was a snapshot in time – to analyze the financial benefits from using GIS across all the departments and offices in Seattle during 2024.

The data to analyze GIS ROI was compiled from both online surveys and from multiple face to face interviews with those knowledgeable about GIS in individual departments. The report also compiled an extensive catalog of other types of benefits from the use of GIS. The report calculated a range for GIS for the entire city and also for many individual departments. GIS ROI was calculated in a variety of ways: net financial ROI in dollar terms, net financial ROI as a percent of GIS costs, GIS ROI as a percent of the entire annual city budget, and the equivalent staff savings in FTEs represented by the net financial ROI. The report also includes 1o appendixes which are GIS ROI reports for 10 key Seattle Departments. In addition to sharing the results this report will provide an overview oof the modified Zerbe methodology used.