Geospatial Platform Benefits
The following is a summary of the anticipated benefits and operational efficiencies that can be realized through the implementation of the Geospatial Platform.
| Return on Investment | Increasing Government Efficiency | Reducing Redundancy | Quality | Usability
Increasing Return on Existing Investments
- Increases the return on government investment in geospatial data, applications, services, and shared infrastructure by enabling discovery, access, and multiple uses of existing assets.
- Decreases the cost of geospatial data and services to agencies by leveraging large-scale purchasing.
- Increases the utility of administrative and statistical data by putting it into a spatial context where additional analyses can be performed quickly at little or no additional cost.
- Decreases the time required to get information on existing geospatial assets to decision-makers for determining an appropriate course of action.
Increasing Government Efficiency
- Decreases the time required to determine the data, tools, services, and infrastructure available to address and understand national issues and events.
- Increases agency resources that can be refocused on core mission requirements by reducing duplicative datasets in multiple agencies.
- Increases the tools and analysis techniques available to decision-makers with little to no new investment in hardware, software, or staff.
- Increases the amount of useful information available to decision-makers.
- Decreases the resources and time spent by agencies on data calls, data discovery, data reformatting and processing.
Reducing Redundancy
- Increases the ability of Federal programs to provide their geospatial data, services, and applications for use and reuse by other agencies.
- Increases the ability of agencies to make the data and or services available by reducing their costs and management requirements through use of open standards and cloud computing.
- Increases the discoverability of assets available to address agency mission requirements.
- Decreases government expenditures on duplicative data creation and management efforts.
Increasing Service Delivery
- Increases the government’s ability to utilize high-value geospatial tools, data, services, and applications to support agencies and decision makers.
- Increases the Federal government’s ability to interact with and leverage the high-value data assets of State, Tribal, regional, local, and non-governmental organizations.
- Decreases the time and resources required to locate, obtain, and use data managed and available from non-Federal agencies.
- Decreases the cost of service management to agencies through shared services and infrastructure.
- Decreases the time required to leverage existing data and investments to solve problems, answer questions, and respond to the public.
Decreasing Development and Management Costs
- Reduces application and services investments by making existing services available for reuse while avoiding duplicative development.
- Reduces time-to-market by reducing service and application development cycles.
- Increases usability by enabling deployment in a cloud computing environment designed to handle surges in use without requiring additional hardware investments.
- Decreases the cost and burden to agencies to host services or build infrastructure.
- Reduces the cost to agencies to meet the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Certification and Accreditation (C&A) requirements while ensuring appropriate security protocols are enforced.
- Increases transparency of available data, enhancing their value and authority.
- Increases the consistency, reliability, and certainty of information and analysis accessibility to by enabling efficient access and use of validated data sources.
- Increases usability of data by making it available beyond a single agency or program.
- Increases usability of data by making it available within a number of shared mapping and analytical tools designed to meet specific mission requirements.
- Increases data consistency, usability, and clarity by providing single format, validated data sources.