GIS is a tool for improving work efficencies….

I am certainly glad last week is about over and thankful for a 3 day weekend. For some reason this year our Budgeting process has increased my stress level a notch or two and I only have had a very small part. However, I’d like not talk about that much this week. I would like to pull something out from my observation of our budgeting process that as a GIS professional believe would be of great value to the decision makers and to all those they have to report to or be held accountable. I heard the term “Efficiency” several times this year, however I have not heard how we are going to achieve this leaner, meaner government. Some believe the only way to achieve efficiency is by cutting budgets and definitely not allowing growth. Cutting back is a way to become leaner, but certainly does not take into consideration that by adding or improving something in one area could save many resources later on down the road. So now let me get on my GIS train….

Philosophically speaking (seems to be a phrase used a lot in our Board meetings), technology tools (especially where GIS is concern) are quickly becoming core infrastructure components of our workplace. Where Government is concerned technology is just as important as….well I better shy away from making a comparison here, however technology IS infrastructure. Now my 30,000′ view in local government is that if we invest in technology with a plan to improve upon our processes, the net long-term gain far exceeds the initial expenditure. I believe any organization that invests and support a GIS, sends a message that they are investing in all the possible improvements to organizational efficiency. Current government these days tend to make me wonder what is efficiency worth in their minds and why do government officials speak of efficiencies, yet struggle to support it? Then again my interpretation of what an efficient measure does may differ from leadership. Improving upon workflow by using some form of technology reduces the level of effort that in turn allows for more work to be accomplished. Introducing GIS to property management 10 – 15 years back has opened a lot of improved work processes and has allowed for better record keeping. Doing this has allowed us to do and provide more services to other County Departments as well as the business community and general pubic. I am not sure I need to list example after example, however if we look at just one service that has made the largest impact on Linn County and the public I would pull out our Web services. Internally, we have reduced foot and phone traffic a great deal not only with our department but with others such as the Assessor(s), Planning and Development, etc. With this Web application running our staff time is able to be allocated to focus on better data maintenance and improving services for our office as well as other County divisions. However I believe the two (2) most important facts that this web mapping tool offers is it allows the public to see how the County is managed and provides the economic development community a tool to attract new business.

So to just wrap this entry of last week up, I am closing with our GIS division’s commitment to our customer. The GIS division will continue to focus on products and services that improve County efficiencies. Hopefully County Leadership will notice the improvements around them.

County GIS Data – To be open or secured?

I had the pleasure of taking part in a couple of meetings this week where the topic of County GIS data availability was questioned. Not if it was available, rather that we make it too easy to get. This is a tough issue, yet is something we all need to think about. I do understand those concerned and am sensitive to many of their talking points. However, I believe most of our data should be accessible and the easier we can make it usable the more efficient our office(s) can become, not to mention the true benefit of how it is used to grow our economy. I do believe that most of the issues I heard this week stem from misinformation or not fully understanding a couple of terms.

Most of us talk in very generalized terms that really leaves people with the privilege to interpret a meaning themselves. To refer to an article in the Cedar Rapids Gazette (See http://tinyurl.com/ydyurpg ), the primary concern is about data that is not in existence nor is it planned. Looking at any County Assessor’s web site across the country, you are likely to see a sketch of a building, outlining the outside perimeter of the structure. No big deal to most and an essential part of an Assessor and/or an appraiser, however someone, somewhere mentioned this to be a detailed floor plan or believe we were about to begin publishing these. My first thought, “Cool”, however there certainly would be some logistical issues to figure out before a “detailed floor plan” project could get under way. First, how and where would we get this data and the ongoing maintenance would be tough. Secondly, even a guy like me that sees Government data as an open book (with the exception of personal privacy, i.e. social security #’s, health information, etc) and easily obtainable. Finally, I am not sure why a County would need floor plans of anything to do our jobs and would consider this a very costly non-essential piece of data. Of course, I guess 1st responders (Police & Fire) may like it for public safety to some degree.

The other item that I just don’t understand is that of providing imagery to the public. Aerial photography is more available across the country than most any other datasets and probably one of the most useful for most users. Obviously there are may scales, resolutions and types of photography that the Geo Spatial community work with, however I learned this week that Google’s Street View and Pictomerty’s Oblique photography are beginning to make some in the public uncomfortable. Now that I think of this while typing, I am not surprised as I remember some past battles. At this time, our County will likely not make our Pictometry imagery available for public consumption, however just wait a couple of years as it will likely end up on Microsoft’s Bing.com in their “Bird’s Eye” view.

Well enough with my week. I really would like to see some comments on this subject of “Open Data” and Data availability. Besides the obvious SS numbers, health information, what is “personal privacy”? How far can we restrict web-based data access without hurting economic development or hurt office efficiencies? This is a big subject and I hope to get some dialog doing, that is if I have anyone that follows this blog.

Some Goal setting….Customer Development

Our management team was recently asked to set a couple of Goals based upon S.M.A.R.T (http://www.topachievement.com/smart.html) as a guideline to set and measure its success.   One of our GIS team goals for the year really focuses on our customers and our attempt to educate them on availability of Web resources.  We are calling this goal “Customer Professional Development”.  For clarification a customer defined by our group is anyone that uses or can make use of our data and services.

First let me talk a bit about this goal setting process (briefly). To be honest, goal setting has/is not one of my favorite things to do and I started off with this request absolutely dreading it.  Once I spent a little time looking over some of the work we have done in the past and trying to apply this SMART goal principles to these old projects, I began to see some of the valuable information I was missing.  Sure I can look back on a particular goal, however I cannot see or show all the little steps, (set-backs and victories) we took to our achievements.  So, even though I believed this to be just another task to do and watch, I have quickly become excited about this ongoing task and the periodic review process.

Now let me explain the “Customer Professional Development” goal.  Here at Linn County, I believe our GIS capabilities are very good.  We have a solid technology infrastructure and very skilled people that take on challenges in a way to help improve government and how it works locally.  One of our major crutches is dealing with routine daily management of property records, specifically when we find problems with recorded documents, such as a property transfer (Deed).  We process nearly 10,000 deeds each year that deal with property and/or property ownership changes.   With this volume, we do expect some issues, however why not shoot for perfection?  We began tacking all our work within a GIS Help Desk tool in September of 2009, which in and of itself is worthy of a Blog entry.  Through this documentation process we have realized that a majority of the problems are issues that start and could end with the deed preparer verifying document for accuracy.  To make this even more interesting, in most instances,  we have found that our web services, if used, would vastly reduce issues on the recorded documents we have to process.

Therefor it is our intention to schedule appointments to meet all our Deed Prepares and their staff’s to make sure they are aware of Linn County Web services that they can freely use.  Let me be clear, we don’t want to do their job or tell them how to do it, however we simply want to make sure they know of our products and how they may be able to apply them to their work flow.  This group of professionals are one of our most important customers because without highly accurate ownership research and documentation our land management system would lose a lot of trust by its daily users, not to mention increase errors to our tax bills.  So by allocating our staff time to spend with these customers, I feel we will spend less time having to deal with issues that show up in our office.  This is a potential huge efficiency improvement for our work flow! Basically we want to take care of our customers, so we can continue to improve upon our product and services.  As our customer base continues to grow we need to continually take it upon ourselves to find our improved efficiencies to keep up with our demand.

Stay tuned, I hope to be able to report back in several months with how this goal goes.  If nothing else, we’ll be able to meet those that we are in contact with every day in person not  just through paperwork.

Working to improve workflow efficiencies…

Last Friday (Jan 15th) I sent an email to our Supervisors in hopes to further educate and/or inform them of the GIS division’s major tasks. My real goal is to begin pushing ways to improve efficiency with many of our internal processes dealing with land management.

I have developed a growing concern that internal decisions are being considered without a full understanding of how offices work and depend upon one another. There are 4 offices in Linn County that work & depend upon one another at least several times each week. These offices (plus a potential 5th) primarily deal with Land and how it is divided, recorded, mapped, regulated, valued and tax collection. There are many possible methods to improve process efficiency, however being a GISer, I am going to promote system integration. The offices speak of all work together very well and we have always talked a good talk, but no one really has taken that first big step until recently.

I’m appending an excerpt of my email attachment where I have listed the GIS services daily business and the outlook of projects being planned and work on in 2010.   Several of these, however will likely take a little more time than I would like, but we all have to have something to strive for these days.

By the way, I am still waiting for a Supervisor to call or at least respond to my email…who knows blogging may be a better way to communicate?

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2010 GIS Services Outlook

The Typical Daily Property Management Workflow
The daily workflow for property management heavily relies upon the Recorders office providing the Auditor’s office with all the recorded documents to map. The average daily document count ranges from 25 to over 100 documents on any given day with an average daily count of 45 to process and maintain current real estate records. Each document is reviewed, processed in COLECT (most require varying levels of research), processed in the GIS (where GPN’s are created or mapping is necessary), and all are run through a Quality control process to verify accuracy both with the document and with our stored data.

Daily contact with the Recorder and both the City and County Assessor are a critical part of our operation in order to maintain current up-to-date property records. Many automated procedures have been put into place over the years, however until the property management system (COLECT ) is replaced and the Assessors are fully integrated daily contact will remain highly important.

Linn County GIS expanded Support
The GIS portion of the property management system is considered to be a matured product, meaning it is currently in a maintenance state. GIS has and continues to expand its services to many County departments as well as the general public. Management of the property system continues to absorb over 60% of our resources, allowing development of new technologies, projects, services and general administration only to be fit in as time permits. We have extended a medium level of services to Planning and Development, Sheriff’s office and recently with the County Assessor over the years and many smaller projects & services to Secondary Roads, Health, Conservation and the Supervisors.

Several of our larger projects not directly tied to our daily work:
1) Sheriff’s Office – Web enabled mapping product to assist with managing Sex Offender residence. Primarily used internally by the Sheriff’s office to inform their staff where sex offender can or cannot live at the time the sex offender registers their new address.
2) Planning & Development – Assisted with completing and now managing tool used by Planning to determine development scoring. Tool is called LESA and is scheduled for total rewrite as time permits due to changes in our technology.
3) Co. Assessor – Land Exemption layer created to enable the Assessor to track and analyze Forest Reserve and Slough Bill areas for the first time. Major benefit is that it accurately illustrates the validity of each area. In some cases we have found areas that do not qualify or have had overlapping exemptions.
4) Conservation – Building a land maintenance tool to track land owned, maintained and managed by Linn County Conservation.
5) EMA – Support EOC operations during any activation as well as during drills. The GIS abilities during the Flood of 2008 supported pre-flood predictions, evacuations, reentry safety, affected properties (Commercial, industrial & residential) and assisted with many after event analysis projects

Current Major Projects
Several major projects are beginning to demand more and more time from the GIS group. It is viewed that with each of the listed projects below will greatly improve County business making our processing more efficient, reliable and useful to all County departments, local business and the general public. It is not believed that workload will be reduced largely due to the ongoing maintenance and support that will be required as well as the many new products that will come about due to data accessibility and analysis. This list has been narrowed to 3 high priority projects:
1) Replacement of COLET (mainframe) – Data behind the map shape is what makes GIS a powerful tool. The weakest point of Linn County’s GIS is the reliance upon COLECT (mainframe) largely due to the inability to make system changes and add important Geospatial attributes that was not important 30 years ago. The MS Govern project or the tool chosen to replace the mainframe is the next major benchmark for GIS in Linn County being able to support many more needs.
2) Integration with Assessor’s appraisal system (Vanguard or VCS) – this will provide the Assessor’s office to compare neighborhood sales data and produce study areas with a map. Over the next several years during their re-evaluation process, this integration will tightly support and illustrate changes needed or validate no change. Ongoing analysis will support new development and allow for areas to be tweaked based upon data.
3) Revamp Web GIS – Current tool is a powerful economic development tool used by nearly 120 unique visitors per day. Future changes include a much more simplified end-user interface as well as being connected to much more data and display designs as it becomes available.

Future

1) Constantly research, discover & implement efficiency improvements for internal work as well as for any County department.
a. Geospatial permit tracking system (Planning, Health, Engineering)
b. Snow removal analysis & routing
c. County projects status reporting
2) Heavy focus on Economic Development, continue to push accurate data out to the masses. Data availability is very important and it needs to become public domain data (free to use).
3) Expand and support mobile business practices for those departments with a mobile staff
a. Blackberry mobile GIS availability and data collection
b. GPS support
c. Non-Blackberry mobile support

Bit of a reveiw of 2009

So, it looks like I have taken a bit of a break from this site.  How is it time gets away so rapidly?  Well with a new year comes new challenges and what better way to start my year off than to sum up what we accomplished in 2009.

I believe change is inevitable within any organization and as a GIS professional we constantly seek change through improvements.  This last fall one of our long time employee’s decided to retire to hang and spend more time with her grand kids.  (Something I hope we all get to enjoy someday).  This provided us the opportunity to change things up a bit in our group and pave a new direction for County GIS, much to her outgoing suggestions.  We shuffled work around a bit and hired replaced her position with a GIS Technician, where in our County was a step or two lower on the pay scale.

The County Assessor worked with our group to build a Land Exemptions layer as well as adding Pictometry tools and imagery to our growing list of data.  This is significant to our County, primarily because in the past the County Assessor did not use our services other than to produce the County plat maps.  Our work with this office has opened to the door for many things to come and are working toward integrating our systems and assisting with supporting their work.

We did buy a mobile application that allows us to push our map technology to Blackberry’s.  This technology has a lot of potential for our field people, yet this really hasn’t taken off.  I believe a major issue we ran into was the overall lack of support from leadership within the departments that could really use this service, not to mention some technical issues with figuring out ways to store collected data.  I am holding out to believe that some groups will eventually want to use this service, however its priority has lowered.

Late in 2009 we introduced a GIS Help Desk system to help us keep track of the routine work we do as well as all the requests we get.  While we are only 3 months into using this tool, we have nearly 2000 tickets that have been created and closed.  Information being collected really helps a guy like me explain what it is we really do and the volume of work that passes through our group of 5 GIS employees.  I’ll have to pull some raw data out of the system and really get into this tool at a later time.

I’m ending with what I believe an exciting enhancement to the our GIS web tools for the public to leverage.  Using some newer technology (for us anyway) our GIS Analyst is working more in-depth with ArcGIS server and Adobe Flex Builder to improve our web presence.  Though it still is in development, I believe it will really improve the end-user experience.  If you’re interested check out the Linn County Flex Viewer at  http://gis.linncounty.org/maps/index.html .  Please comment.

Well, I better sign off for now.  One of my personal goals is to post something at least once a week so this blog should get a little more interested in time.

Cheers!

An East Central IA GIS Day…and a bit of a rant

Once again I’m going to stray away a bit from the Linn County GIS history and reflect on a couple of topics a bit more current.  I figure if I am going to stay with this blog thing I need to not worry so much about painting the past (though I will complete that task) but rather discuss some of the current topics.  I am sure at times I’ll even venture out beyond my GIS world.

I am part of a small group that will soon be gearing up for a GIS Day event (possibly Nov 18^th) that we hope to focus on a GIS value to economic development.  Through some of our brainstorming sessions, we hope to demonstrate the research and findings that the Iowa Geographic Information Council (IGIC) has collected and showcase several examples.  This group has done excellent job gathering information about GIS at County and State agencies throughout Iowa.  All this work is defining the Iowa Geospatial Infrastructure (IGI) with documents supporting the value of GIS to these groups and by the sounds of it will soon be expanding the effort out to Cities, COG’s and more.

Jumping back to my GIS Day post, we want to help expand on the IGI findings and focus on the economic impact GIS has for our local community.  Our plans are basically to develop a 2-3 hour program with a couple of quick examples of GIS resources that are available, a couple of quick results that when GIS was used help, and some video candy to potentially show successes that we have yet to accomplish.  Our target audience is for those that really focus on economic development that may or may not have a whole lot of GIS knowledge.  Hopefully we can get some help with our Chamber and/or some of the local groups that work to attract business to the region.

While our group continues discussing our plans, I find it amazing how we GIS types think very similar, yet we all have a long ways to go to really become main stream.  What I mean here is that throughout the State of Iowa, we have approximately 80 of the 99 Counties doing something with GIS.  Of these 80 Counties only 2 (that I am aware) provide core GIS layers at no charge for public use.  Sure there are several dozen Counties that provide web applications that serve data, so the general public can make a map or check on their neighbor’s property assessment values. Is this really enough?  I’ll go out on a limb here and say that most GIS professionals as well as most known studies on this subject illustrate that the more data and resources that are available for public consumption the greater return on investment we get out of our expensive GIS products.  However, measuring this ROI becomes a bit of a mystery due to the difficulty of measuring intangibles.  I do join those that believe that data a public entity creates and manages in a GIS is public information and should be very easily obtained at no cost.  I also realize there are certain legal, privacy and security concerns that need to be handled, but charging for parcels and assessment data, road centerlines, orthophotos, tax districts, etc should not fit under that umbrella.  After all, just Google your name once and just see how much the world knows about you and where you live.  Providing local GIS data will do a little of this, however it also just may be the key component that creates and saves jobs for each of our communities.

Ok, I drifted a bit, sorry I guess I should take up the free data topic in a later blog.  All in all, we hope to build this GIS Day as a way to begin building awareness of GIS (its tools and data products) and the people that manage it.  Our target is the economic development industry (public and private) such as realtors, commercial & industrial contractors, and hopefully a public official or two.  GIS will be mentioned a time or two, however we hope to build this 2 to 3 hour program with stories that actually brought or is helping to manage industry in our area.

Welcome to 1998 and ESRI

Ok, so I am thinking that Linn County’s journey with GIS isn’t the most exciting stuff to follow but I really want to accomplish a brief historical log of where our group has come from before I get into some of our more current events.  I basically have 3 more entries to breeze through before I sink myself into some pretty good stuff dealing with our historic floods in 2008.  So do stay tuned…

The summer of 1998 was when the County hired its first GIS Coordinator (lucky for me; and thanks to former Linn County Auditor, Linda Langenberg, who hired me).  My initial task was to begin putting the pieces together to build a seamless county base map.  Upon my arrival, the County did have very good digital parcel line work, however it was tiled data with no Geospatial connectivity.  Basically we had a few thousand section maps, ¼  section maps, quarter-quarter  section maps and town maps; none were geo-referenced with one another.  Although ArcView 3 existed in our Planning department; the Auditor’s office was working in Intergraph with an MGE connection that was never was completed.

I was already an ESRI believer (yes I was drinking the Kool-aid) and contacted the ESRI office in St Louis to begin moving the Auditor’s Office towards the 20^th century. We discussed the options, both software and our data migration.  After several weeks of conversations, we (Linn County Auditor’s Office) made the decision to proceed with an internal conversion process using ArcINFO 7.x.  We also purchased a studio training or rent-a-tech (as they called it back then) to help devise a plan and process to create our seamless base map.  Once that process was complete we spent the next several months converting Microstation DGN files to ArcINFO coverage’s as well as rubber sheeting (edge matching) each into what was known as Map Librarian.  Does anyone remember working with Librarian?    Performance considerations were important, so this allowed us to limit the amount of data within each Map Librarian tile.  Maintenance was also improved largely due to managing only several dozen librarian tiles.   I am glad, however, that we no longer are using Map Librarian as it was complex to maintain, store and serve map data, however at the time it was cheap and allowed us to move forward.

As we were working through this conversion process, we were dealt a project that actually started in 1995 but was never completed and needed to be rectified.  This project was renumbering all 80,000 plus parcels with a new Geo-Referenced Parcel number (I’ll refer to this as our GPN).  This project deserves its own blog entry and I’ll explore this topic in the next several weeks.  I just wanted to bring it up at this time to place this project on my radar to remember (as if I will ever forget this period of agony) and to note that this project started while our group was neck deep in our GIS map layer conversion.  I just got to say, I had one hell of a staff during that time period!

I think I have gone far enough for this entry and by the looks of the rest of this week I may not be back until this weekend or early next week (unless something juicy comes up to distract me from the everyday grind).  Until the next entry, Cheers.

Linn County GIS Phase 1

I’m going to take this post back a few years and do my best to recall how the GIS started at Linn County.  I started at Linn County in June of 1998 as the first GIS professional hired in the County, however GIS was being used in a couple of departments.  At the time I was hired, the County GIS (as I now call it) had already gone through a couple of changes.

Linn County was blessed with two Assessors’, one for the City of Cedar Rapids and the County Assessor for everything else.  I am going to give both Assessors’ credit here for being the visionaries that invested to begin automating their mapping needs way back in 1987.  The tool of choice was AutoCAD.  Shortly after this start the Linn County Planning department joined the effort and divided up the County Assessor’s duties by assuming the rural areas of the County.  In 1991, the County GIS function was moved to the Auditor’s office, along with the one or two staff members hired to draft parcel lines.  It was about this time that the County began the effort to move to Microstation Intergraph, which was a little better drafting tool with the ability to connect to a database using MGE.

I do need to point out to those reading this blog that although I will reference the City from time to time, I really do not represent their journey nor will I try.  Though we do work pretty well together, we each have very different needs and answer to a very different group so I will try to keep this a County process.

Moving right along between the years of 1991 an 1998, the Auditor’s office provided a mapping product to the County Assessor and managed the real estate (Ownership) records for all of Linn County.  There was an attempt around 1995 to renumber the parcels using a Geo-Referenced numbering system, however did fail after a lot of hours and money spent with the attempt.  As it was described to me, consultants that were hired to help with GIS during the 90’s really never worked out and the trust typically achieved between a County and consultant was never gained.  In fact, a consultant became a bad word and worse yet GIS worth was in jeopardy.

It’s getting time to end this entry, however I did want to get to 1998 when I was hired and a new direction started.  I believe the County fathers at that time finally decided that in order for GIS to really get off the ground, they needed to begin placing people in the right locations for GIS to really get off the ground.  Basically they realized a person or group of people, were needed to talk the GIS language and guide the County through its GIS development stages.  Lots of credit has to be given to the Linn County Auditor in 1998, who spent a lot of time & energy securing funding for my position and a 3^rd mapper, of which I got the pleasure to hire months into the job.

Check back in a couple of days and I hope to have this history continue with a couple of our conversion efforts.

Entry # 2 – GIS is a Career?

Only on my 2nd blog entry and I am already straying from my planned process of chronologically posting historical processes of Linn County GIS.  I guess this is where I can make this more entertaining???

Received a call today from an individual I had meet several weeks ago at a regional meeting to talk about  a career in the GIS profession.  This person is looking to make a possible career change and wanted to know how I entered into this world of GIS and seeking some advice that I may have to help.  I knew the call was coming due to a series of voice mails and email exchanges that set a time for me to be at my desk.  When the call came through and I began talking (well maybe rambling is a better word), I realized that other than growing up on a farm in Western Iowa, GIS related work is all I have ever done.  My first year in college, Dr Don Hagan (my advisor) convinced me and about everyone else that took his Into to Geography class, that there wold be a great paying job waiting for us after college (he said 99% placement).  Well, Mr farm kid, who chose college based on cost, the party away from home and with no real plans to finish, was surprisingly taking note.  That was my 2nd or 3rd class my freshman year, and by the second semester I was hooked on just the possibility.  So I guess I am one of those that actually really likes the job that I studied for during college (note here that my definition of good study habits are still being defined).

So, why GIS?  Looking back over the last 15-18 years (yes, this does date me a bit), I have to say the technology has been just as exciting as it was when it was being explained to that farm kid throughout college.  It was intriguing and still is! GIS technologies have come a long way since the early 90′s and I have to say I really believe it is still evolving today.  Working with people that have no clue what GIS stands for not to mention the possibilities it offers has to be the most satisfying part of the job.  As one of my clients once told me several days into a job, this stuff is just like a video game (now he wants me to help run his organization using GIS, like a video game – managing  jobs, products and people).  Funny thing is I think we can do it.   GIS allows us to put data together and visualize a result, the more data we can throw at a particular question or issue the more clear the picture can be displayed.

So back to my phone conversation and offering some of my recommendations as to what someone needs to know to get noticed in order to get started with a career in GIS.  This largely depends on basic interest.  As with any job it definitely starts with a passion for a particular subject,  then use GIS as a tool to support that particular industry.  GIS is a wonderful tool that, if used properly, supports many objectives.  The key is being able to identify how.

Education is important and besides a full fledged degree, Colleges are beginning to offer GIS Certificate programs that will really help with education.  The programs I am somewhat familiar with usually can be accomplished in a year or spread out over time as night or web based courses.  As with any advance computer system, programming and database management skills are very important, both can open a lot of doors as experience is gained.

Obviously experience is important, however just starting out this isn’t really easy to come by. If you are looking for ways to gain experience, call your City, County or a State offices and just inquire if they do mapping or have a need for an Intern or part-time project based work.  Call the Census Bureau, they have a lot of work going on right now and need a lot of people to do  a lot of different things.  Anything allowing you to use the GIS technology outside the college setting is huge.

Well, even though I have tried to keep this short, I think I have rambled enough for tonight.  I know I am not covering it all and hope that if others are reading this that they chime in with comments to help elaborate on this subject.  There certainly are many different philosophies and I too would like to hear about them.

Where do I start…

Being that this is the first of many potential entry’s, I figure I better introduce myself to this new world I am venturing towards and breifly note my journey.

First my name is Jason Siebrecht, I have a fiance (no rush on the marriage thing), we are raising our 3 girls and two dogs.  I guess someday the marriage thing will happen, but no real rush (unless there is an exotic location that may entice me to proceed…)  I will  likely be mixing some of my personal life into this bloggers world of mine, mostly because it simply can be funny.

I started working in the GIS field in college at Northwest Missouri State doing some neat interns within the Geography department tracking Student attrition.  I’ll likely have to expand on this at another time.  Following college, I spent some time manually drafting maps at a Regional Council of Government, then a year at M.J Harden working on oil and gas pipeline mapping within an Intergraph environment.  I really enjoyed the night shift at Harden and received a great deal of experience with graphics editing and quality control  procedures.  My next 5 year gig was spent with the City of Branson, MO working as an engineering tech, then as a GIS Coordinator.  Again, I’ll spend some blogging time with my experience as a City GISer.  In 1998, I decided to check the job market and landed in Linn County.  Why leave Branson?  No real reason, just wanted to move closer to family where I grew up (although I am still 200 miles away – but in Iowa).

I have been employed at Linn County, IA since June of 1998.  I was the first to fill the position as GIS Coordinator and still working at the same level (although it seems many more duties have come along for the ride).  Our group consists of 4 full time GIS professionals, the usual Summer or part time Intern and recently added the help of a temporary worker.  As typical County GIS division’s get started, ours started out creating and managing property ownership of the County.  Over the next several weeks, I will attempt to journal our journey of the last 12 years.  I am sure I’ll have the opportunity to shake my head wondering why we did what we did and hope you chime in and provide comments or questions as you have them.  I’ll do my best to monitor and respond to the best of my ability.

I think I may want to end here for now, figure out how to post and let people know about this effort of mine.  I’ll try to jazz it up a bit as well.  Later.