Oregon ESRI ELA and the Legislation Behind It

The interesting part of today’s press release regarding the State of Oregon purchasing an Enterprise License Agreement from ESRI for an “all you can eat” plate for software for the state was the reference to the legislation passed to make ESRI software the standard.

Oregon also recently passed legislation making ESRI technology the standard for GIS in all state agencies. The administrative rule is Oregon’s first IT standard.

Five other states have ELA’s (Alabama, Delaware, Maine, Montana, and North Carolina) though I’m not sure if they also have laws on the books. I dug back and found an FAQ from 2007, when the legislation was proposed. The text of the legislation, passed earlier this year (I could not find the date) is here.

The benefits of standardizing on ESRI technology are detailed in the FAQ:

(a) Current installed base of GIS software and trained expertise within state agencies.
(b) General technical benefits associated with the use of standardized software, including but not limited to:
Simplified software and application infrastructure configurations.
Ease of software installations and upgrades.
Simplified application connectivity, security and data distribution architectures.
The capacity for simultaneous multi-user editing, dataset versioning, and history retention.
The ability to utilize existing geospatial business intelligence to ensure data integrity and consistency via the establishment of topology rules, data attribute domain rules, and data validation rules.
(c) Enterprise-oriented data and application accessibility offered by the use of common GIS software deployed across state agencies.
(d) Enhanced functionality and interoperability of related software components within a suite of software applications including the reduction of costly data translations between diverse software products and the ability to leverage data modeling and processing efforts for reuse between agencies.
(e) Ease of sharing geospatial data among agencies and with the public based on a common GIS software infrastructure

Also noteworthy: no one would be forced to buy or use ESRI software per an exemption.

...the proposed OAR [Oregon Administrative Rule] includes an exception process that recognizes the existence and potential persistence of non-ESRI legacy software use and that a business rationale may exist for future state agency investments in non-ESRI GIS software.