#ESRIUC: GIS in California—More Than a Map

Michael Byrne, the Geographic Information Officer (GIO) for the State of California provided a summary of the work he has been doing in the job he ascended to only 3 months ago and is now working for Teri Taki, the state’s CIO. He made is comments at the Senior Executive Seminar at the ESRI UC.

The state’s IT capital plan has 122 new, approved project concepts.  Each concept is mapped to a strategic goal. The Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO), Finance and others departments will develop these concepts further. The realization is that 70% of all concepts have collaborative opportunities and each could be aligned strategically. Doing this alignment is the thrust of this early work of the OCIO.

In his thinking, Byrne said that "IT should be as reliable as energy…just flip on!"

He further commented that, "IT needs to be used to transform lives and services…it actually has to do something to transform business." He also said that in looking at the enterprise technology for the state, GIS is their #1 enterprise technology with business intelligence (BI) solutions and transaction processing following.

Byrne believes that utilizing GIS will improve public policy decisions. "GIS is the new “white board," said Byrne. "It used to be we would talk to people around a white board; now we are using a map."

He also said that support from the executive level is very key. "Schwarzenegger gets GIS. Because he gets it, we’re definitely doing things," said Byrne.

California now has 200 terabytes of data and more than 11,000 GIS databases or projects with at least 40 state agencies and departments currently using GIS.