Over the nearly 8 years of this international award-winning program we have assisted the client in many different aspects of the initiative, including baseline situation assessment, strategic planning, design, implementation and operations support. Our staff presence has varied from a high of 22 persons in 2008 helping to set up and stabilize the technical and institutional governance frameworks for the program, to 4 staff in 2016 who assisted in a refresh of the strategy that aligns the NSDI with the progressive “Smart Government” program of ADSIC. Staff allocations have included consultants, programmers, standards experts, legal experts, technicians and operators.
The AD-SDI Program was initially conceived as a staged implementation starting with a foundation (stage 1), moving into institutionalizing and strengthening (stage 2) and finally into ongoing monitoring, assessment and adaptive management (stage 3). The foundation stage, which was a six-month fast track, was successfully completed between June and December, 2007. It established the basic foundation elements of the AD-SDI including refinement of the previous stakeholder situation assessment regarding GIS development in all the key agencies, development of an AD-SDI Strategic Plan that delineates data, technical and institutional target states, and alignment of existing major data development projects. It established also a Geospatial Portal and Data Clearinghouse, populated the Clearinghouse with representative data from all the participating agencies, leveraged existing data for visible results, established representative Technical Committee to participate in and guide the AD-SDI development process, and ensured that capacity building programs are in place for all participating agencies that need to be responsible custodians and users of the AD-SDI. The first stage culminated in the development and distribution of an AD-SDI Program Design, Implementation Plan, and an Operations Plan for the Spatial Data Center (SDC).
The second stage of AD-SDI started formally on April 14, 2008 and was completed by March 2010. Stage 2 involved the expansion, refinement, and institutionalizing of the AD-SDI infrastructure foundations established in Stage 1, including the addition of data and metadata, coordinating with selected agencies to develop their own Geospatial nodes, monitoring data and capacity building projects, continuing to provide analyst support to the Executive Council and others, deploying the latest technology based AD-SDI Geospatial Portal 2.1, and adding integration and spatially enabled applications to the e-Government portal and government agency websites where appropriate. During this stage, the AD-SDI project team supported the initial operations of the AD-SDI Spatial Data Centre (SDC) and assisted ADSIC in carrying out a capacity building program for permanent staff that will ultimately take over the operations and administration of the AD-SDI program.
The third stage of AD-SDI started formally on March 2010. Stage 3 targets the evolution of the AD-SDI program into adaptive management, monitoring and continuous innovation. This period will focus on strengthening the AD-SDI foundation by: expanding the stakeholder community (currently more than 50 entities); completing the formalization of data sharing arrangements; aligning and tracking all major data projects and initiating any additional projects needed to fill remaining gaps; continuing the development and enforcement of standards and interoperability best practices with the community; leveraging AD-SDI data and infrastructure to support wide range of high value, high impact services and products; and institutionalizing the data maintenance and expansion of the Data Clearinghouse to include all fundamental data layers that are needed in common by the stakeholder community; and work toward the data flow automation between the individual nodes and the central AD-SDI nodes where necessary.
GPCGIS was responsible for setting up the original Program Management Office functions and staffing for the management of the AD-SDI and for collaborating with ADSIC staff in evolving and refining this framework over the years. Originally, GPCGIS staff were commissioned to support most of the program management functions and to work with ADSIC in the recruitment and training of staff to take over these roles over time. Today the AD-SDI PMO is fully self-sufficient and GPCGIS has just recently completed a project to refresh the AD-SDI Strategic Plan and policy framework.