The Lessons of the Digital Parcel Map In the 1980s and 90s, counties across the country took their first serious steps into digital GIS. Parcel maps that had lived comfortably in filing cabinets for decades were transformed into tidy digital…
Author’s Note: This is the second article in a short series documenting my journey from just being “The GIS Guy” to a broader strategic role. If you haven’t read the first installment I encourage you to start there. The rest…
The Unexpected Beginning of a Transformation When I took over the GIS Department for St. Joseph County, MI, in 2016, I assumed I understood the terrain. After nearly twenty years running a private GIS consulting company, I figured a rural…
Notes from the messy middle of local government modernization. For most of my 30+ year career, I assumed GIS was perched on the edge of a grand evolutionary leap. The sort of leap that would reveal itself any day now,…
Author’s note: In When a Map Isn’t Just a Map, we showed that GIS already functions as the cognitive infrastructure of local government. In The GIS Awakening, we reframed the GIS professional as a knowledge architect stewarding that institutional intelligence.…
Author’s note: In my last article “When a Map isn’t just a Map” we reframed GIS as the foundation of data intelligence. Today we look at what that means for local government GIS professionals. A Quiet Revolution Hidden in Plain…
The Everyday Hero of Local Government In the great machinery of local government, GIS has long been the quiet, dependable cog, the one that keeps turning even when nobody notices. It maintains order, aligns parcels, and ensures that when a…
From GIS Director to Digital Information Director: Why I Made the Leap About two years ago, I started to suspect that the traditional GIS department model wasn’t built for where local government was heading. At the time, I was the…
Confessions of a GIS Lifer: Our Field Is Too Small for the Future By Jerry Happel, Director of Digital Information, St. Joseph & Van Buren Counties, MI Authors note: In a previous article, I explained why I no longer call…
For three decades, my professional identity was simple: I was a GIS guy. I founded a consulting firm, PlanSight, that became an ESRI Partner of the Year in 1999. I built several businesses on ESRI technology. Later, I ran GIS…
