Issue link: https://resources.esri.ca/i/1313392
38 | GEOSPATIAL STRATEGY ESSENTIALS FOR MANAGERS MATTHEW LEWIN Chapter 7 How to Organize Your Geospatial Talent Use these common organizational models to align your people to your strategy R egardless of the size or maturity of an organization's geospatial program, how to structure a team of geospatial professionals is a dilemma that comes up time and time again. Typically, the question revolves around whether to centralize or decentralize. Should we group everyone who can spell GIS into a central team so we get some consistency? Or should we leave departments to their own devices and let them grow and manage their own teams? Or should we do a bit of both and form a hybrid model? In some organizations, there's a strong philosophical tendency towards centralization. The desire for control and focus compels these organizations to group common capabilities. For others, a culture of autonomy empowers managers to focus on their own interests. The drive toward speed, agility and innovation motivates these organizations to build what they need, where they need it. Each model has its advantages, but inevitably, over time, cracks emerge. A centralized team becomes overburdened with responsibility and is perceived as a bureaucratic bottleneck by the rest of the organization. Every map, app or dataset that is conceived of is provided by this one team—often to the dismay of the business. On the other hand, a decentralized organization can find itself facing widespread redundancy in roles, systems and datasets and often struggles with collaboration. The phrase "that's our geodatabase" or "they work for me" is commonplace. This swing back and forth between centralization and decentralization usually leads organizations to consider a hybrid approach. It's a natural conclusion, really. Let's have the best of both worlds—the control and oversight of centralization and the autonomy and agility of decentralization! The trick is figuring out what, specifically, should be centralized and what should be decentralized. This leads to several questions. How do we balance the competing forces of centralization and decentralization? How do we make sure the resulting model is a fit for our organization? And where in the organization should my new team reside? Let's find out! Common Organizational Models Before we look at how to define your model, it's helpful to look at some example organizational structures. While it's rare to find an organization that implements their geospatial program exactly as defined by these models, it's useful to review some common patterns. Generally, they fall on a spectrum from centralized to decentralized as described in the image below.