Psomas
Aligning GIS with Business Objectives

The management of public works assets is an increasing problem for agencies due to an aging infrastructure, limited funding for maintenance and repair, an aging workforce, and often outdated methods for managing scheduled and responsive work activities. Establishing a strategic asset management program focuses an organization on a strategic pathway for enhanced asset management to address priority needs in a sustainable manner.

“Psomas has been in providing geospatial and asset management solutions for 30 years,” Craig Gooch, Vice President of the firm. Throughout this timeframe, a key challenge for agencies has been the fragmentation of information and work processes associated with asset planning, procurement, operations, and maintenance. Best practices for enterprise asset management are articulated by the Institute of Asset Management and imbodied in ISO 550001 Asset Management Systems Standards. This information provides guidance for an organization seeking to improve the complete asset management lifecycle.

GIS provides a means of organizing otherwise disparate information within and organization to increase the comprehensive understanding of asset related information across an organizations’ functions. Establishing a common view of activities and assets help decision making for what work takes priorities and how best to allocate resources. Implementing a GIS based asset management program provides the necessary information to achieve program goals by focusing on areas with the greatest impact. Psomas’ understanding of our client’s business plus a strong technological foundation provides the right resources to help government and utilities advance their planning and operational effectiveness.

The firm’s unique approach involves creating a sustainable GIS solution based on the client’s business needs to deliver measurable value to their core objectives. In the current market scenario, as enterprises start to embrace asset management—the use of geographical information systems (GIS) combined with business intelligence is helping enterprises operate and improve productivity, and manage costs like never before.

Our implementation recommendations are geared towards a capability, maturity model approach that facilitates the organization to advance itself in specific areas in an incremental way that is achievable and practical and gets results

GIS based asset management solutions enable agencies to track employees, assets, and equipment, to collect and interpret data in real-time to make effective decisions based on priority and resource availability.

Psomas’ geospatial technology implementation process aligns geospatial initiatives with organizational strategic priorities. Psomas conducts a “needs assessment” engagement with its clients to evaluate the existing environment of technology processes and employee skill-sets with focus on opportunities where the enterprise can seek to align its technology with their strategic initiatives better. Using the gathered insights, Psomas develops a strategic geospatial master plan that lays out the implementation of the a GIS and asset management program to enable the integration of the client’s geospatial technology requirements with their business systems such as computerized maintenance management systems, engineering models, financial and record management systems and more. Also, the strategic master plan provides discrete benefits by addressing specific areas such as the organizational structure and staffing levels as well as the technology platform requirements.

Marcia Carrillo, Geospatial Team leadThese strategic master plans generally provide athree to five year roadmap, allowing clients to present their boards or funding authorities for a program plan to not only focus on enhancing their capabilities but also to sustain the program. “A key effort in these master plans is to assure that there is sufficient understanding of the requirements to sustain the geospatial program and keep the data current as well as the various software solutions,” states Marcia Carrillo, Geospatial Team Lead.

“Our implementation recommendations are geared towards a capability, maturity model approach that facilitates the organization to advance itself in specific areas in an incremental way that is achievable and practical in getting results,” states Gooch. To illustrate, a water agency retained Psomas to perform a GIS needs assessment and strategic planning initiative. The firm developed a multi-year master plan to address the client’s concerns and identified that there were areas across the entire business line of the water agency that could benefit from GIS being more central in workflows throughout the organization in each of the departments. Following the adoption of the master plan, over three years, the water agency has been able to address significant issues and experience improvements in the efficiency and quality of their work processes that support infrastructure management and customer service. The plan contributed to improvements in the water agency’s data quality by integrating and aligning the various departments using common GIS data for diverse business processes.

Psomas’ core focus is to continue delivering an array of geospatial and asset management solutions to support clients from an enterprise perspective and help establish best practices for ongoing asset management to make sure that GIS is aligned with the organizational strategies and demonstrates value along the way.