CO-MAPPS notes
Oct. 27, 2011
Launched CO-MAPPS at GIS in the Rockies conference. Today has 17 member firms.
MAPPS meeting next in Phoenix.
Palatiello: We want to brand geospatial for Colorado.
JonitaLeRoy’s presentation:
Presentation is overview of what the Gov wants to do re economic development. What has been done so far, what we want to do to grow this industry.High growth market that needs to be marketed better.Great numbers & work already being done. Very excited that a formal chapter has started in CO
Started 8 years ago in CIO, & went on loan to econ development, to grow high tech industries. With Hick, specifically want to make sure we grow high tech jobs in Co.
Secretary of Technology for CO – Kristen Russell, recruited by state away from Oracle, before that she was with Sun. Has come to work for the public sector now. Commissioned by the gov to grow tech jobs in Colorado.
State initiatives online:
Hick commissioned a “bottom-up tour” of Colorado econ develop – threw out Denver plans and went to talk to the counties.
Some counties had econ develop plan, some didn’t. Grand County had a 1965 2-page paper. Every county at a different level.
All 64 counties now have an updated summary on what they want for their counties. Growth and/or maintenance.
14 Regional Plans – met with them all in regions, made Regional Statements that they decided on. Central Mountains: tourism.
Worked with Council of Governments system (COG) – because they were already working together and used to that. DRCOG for Denver, other COGs for other regions. More than 10,000 responses on surveys.Printed copies of the surveys at all the libraries and CU extensions, also online.
Colorado State of Mind: Innovation.
Great entrepreneurs here. We create technologies and then they get bought up by companies on the coasts. Serial entrepreneurs, they stay here.
6 different areas of Econ Devel that Hick is focusing on:
- Business friendly environment
- Retain, grow and recruit companies
- Increase access to capital
- Create and market a stronger Colorado brand
- Educate and train the workforce of the future
- Cultivate innovation and technology
Training dollars available through Colorado – to train employees on new tech. Up to $800 per employee in matching funds.Classes through community college system.
Broadband initiative. Jon Gottsegan is working on this. Leverage federal broadband funding. Plan to work with local tech teams and local communities. Carrier neutral, open access.7 official local tech planning teams now. BTOP Grant provides for Mapping of data – what is currently there in broadband capabilities. Mapping from the service providers as to what they have available re broadband across the state. Issue: how fast what they claim vs what speeds are actually there. In terms of spatial coverage we think we are ok. This is a major success of Fed/State collaboration. Complex process to get to it.
Alignment – 3 dimensional approach: state, industries and regions.
State puts GIS in Information Technology category – this is Joneta’s category
Definition: IT: hardware, software, communications and the “enabling” technology that makes that work: including Geospatial, Nano, Photonics, Communications
Working on a strategic plan for this IT category right now.Setting baselines right now. Wants to know what is happening in GIS industry right now. Occupational codes, to include people doing “geo” work who aren’t working for “geo” companies.
Other categories:
Aerospace, energy, bioscience/healthcare, manufacturing
This is top priority for Hick administration.
Make it effective, efficient and elegant to bring jobs to Colorado.
Marketing & Branding the state:
Wants Colorado to be known as the “Silicon Mountain of the IT Community.”
Plan: attract two new technology companies to Colorado each year (have done this for 2011) Two new tech companies coming here as of this year:
- Arrow Electronics is moving here. 500 new jobs coming with it. Not relocated jobs, new jobs.
- GE Solar – about 400 new jobs when they move here.
Grow IT jobs in Colorado by x% (or # of new jobs) by 2013. Still to determine metric, want information industry by industry.
Local technology teams (map on site) – Fremont county does not have team yet
“Colorado Broadband Knights of the Roundtable” – to promote coordination between the various groups already doing something like this.
Need to do: Identify baselines for the Geospatial industry:
- # of Geo companies/public agencies in Colorado
- Total employment
- Total annual $
- Average annual salary $
Colorado Dept. of Labor & Employment – has an online report form that shows codes, etc. to create reports to create this baseline. Sometimes hard to verify, because it depends on how company reports it. Standard federal classifications. Labor dept classifications in GIS are completely out of date.
Land Surveyor and mapper – that’s about it that sort of fits.
Jonita: they are revising this now. Revising definition of a “small company” – will affect what’s a subcontractor, etc. Dept of Labor identified Geospatial as a profession/industry just this past summer. Created a “competency model” as part of that. This will be important in how they write RFPs. Huge step for GIS community.
Dictionary of Occupational Titles – very behind. Has not caught up. They are trying to edit a 25-year-old list and not yet willing to start with new categories.
Joneta – says we might need to work together on this, to help. Since this is important to the governor.
Discussion – let’s distinguish the method – to create a baseline, let’s consider intersections with aerospace, for instance. Bell, Lockheed Martin, Peterson Air Force Base, Buckley – lots of geospatial. As an organization it behooves us to be a Geospatial Mountain rather than Silicon.
In Boulder there’s NOAA – very GIS.
Where does Digital Globe, Geo Eye, even Trimble – where do they fit? Some would put them in Aerospace.
This is such a cross-cutting technology.
Microsoft, has GIS division. But not necessarily self-declared.
Joneta, that’s right. So at the launch of this organization we are here to work with you on this.
We will set up committees for industry categories, and we will ask you to participate in that. We’ll need advice on this.
People working in the state of Colorado – just less than 2.7 million.The number in IT (officially) 250k or thereabouts.
Identifying employees in those areas of overlap – do you have to be in one bin? How do you keep from double-counting someone who is IT and GIS? (programmer and geospatial worker?)
Also, what matters: # of employees or how much $ is made? – Joneta: it’s a combination.
The state recognizes that it’s there, but we don’t have the information to know how to talk about it accurately – as a strong economic factor in Colorado.
Rick Serbyover the past 24 months, worked with Career Builder – looking at jobs & recruitment in GIS. We’ve identified the top 10 organizations who recruit for Geospatial: (these are some, he talked too quickly for me to get all of them!)
- USGS
- Woolpert
- NGIA
- LockheedMartin
- Northrup Grumman
Need to learn more, but trying to identify who is hiring in this arena.
Nationally: - and note that every one of them would fall into a different industry category than strictly GIS: (generally IT, aerospace, telecom, utilities)
- GE & GE Electric
- Cricket
- Televent
- Red Hen
Denver ranks solidly in the top 10 cities for GIS recruitment.
“Compared to the population, we’re hot stuff. “ - Rick
Estimate: 100k GIS workers in Colorado, in all sectors, it’s a coarse number but working on drilling down. Very rough estimate. Working committee – Serby and Brant Howard are co-chairs of this committee!!
When the economy comes back, the recessionary numbers we’re looking at will explode. Plus we are using GIS as the keyword, therefore we’re missing a lot. Need to flesh out job titles and skill sets to better identify.
Mark Schubert – re the Colorado First Fund for matching funds for training. We are more cutting edge so colleges don’t even have courses. But manufacturer training – would funds be available for that.
Joneta: YES. Meet Sam Bailey as the person heading that program. Classes can be specific. Funds go through community colleges as the funding mechanism, but the classes can be at your business.
The community college system is hungry for feedback to develop classes that meet needs. Need to work with them to develop that training. GIS certificate program, for instance – how worthwhile is it? One Llana knows of doesn’t actually train them in how to build maps. Pikes Peak Community College does have such a board and a couple of people here are on it.
Joneta – Colorado just got another huge grant for workforce development. Let’s put it to this.
CO-MAPPS will have an education committee because we know what our needs are. We will be defining that. Stephanie Stephans is the director of this & needs to know what this community needs.
Federal Funding – Perkins Act –to be eligible, a community college has to have an industry advisory committee. Here’s an opportunity for us to have a seat at that table.
We need to consider what we’d ask the educational community in Colorado should offer to help us. ASPRS, other groups can help us. It’s a responsibility of this group to engage the state. We need to define our needs.
Have to help them figure out how GIS certificate, for instance, fits into an associates degree and could fit into a bachelor degree program for transfer.
John Gottsegan update:
Broadband initiative, 911, these are issues being worked on now. Had a meeting with a Senator from Idaho re GIS. Talking to Census Bureau re how they do their work, looking at their address data.
Re the state, my office has mostly been the Broadband effort. I’m using state enterprise activity program. They are willing to use to capacity (not as limited as federal programs) so we’ll roll out some more services.
Also looking at cloud initiatives, 4 states are getting together for joint procurement of cloud services. Refining what we’re doing now. At the beginning of strategies for how the state will use the cloud capabilities.
Afternoon session
John Palatiello – MAPPS executive director
Good news: House has just repealed the 3% hold back rule. Goes back to the Senate now.
Why are you here today? What do you want to get out of it?
-Wanted to hear Joneta’s presentation
-Believe the community affinity makes sense
-Nature of the business is partnership/competitors/business partners. This is part of networking/business development
SWOT Analysis for Colorado Geospatial Community
Strengths:
-Cluster of geospatial firms in the state/critical mass in Colorado.
-Rapidly improving tech has increased profit margins & opportunities
-The demand is growing & stronger than other economic sectors
-Comfortable fit with Colorado culture (environmental issues, energy, land use)
-A lot of the high tech that created GIS innovation started here.
-Long tradition of being a national leader in GIS – both military & private
-Committed professionals (time, effort, talent)
Weaknesses:
-Haven’t been recognized as an industry sector or understanding even of what geospatial means
-Lack of consensus in the community on key issues
-Not politically active as an industry/community
-Price of competition lowering profit margins
-Lack of accepted community-wide standards for ethics and professional practice
-Shortage of qualified employees, though Colorado is in better position than many of the rest of the community hubs
-Weak economy - A lot of businesses based in Colorado are not getting Colorado business (depending on the business) Have to be national
-Horizontal sector – it dilutes our ability to form a cohesive community (diversification of the community is a potential weakness unless we have a way to form across industries like aerospace, defense
-We have a lot of geo professionals here but not corporate headquarters (Lockheed, for instance)
Opportunities:
-Lack of coordinated geospatial policy/strategy at the state level: we can define/help build this
-Great launch point: we can make visibility happen as a group
- Especially once we have solid numbers
- Brand the industry in the state
- We can bring in a lot of small firms that could benefit from the “clustering” idea and being part of the state recognition
-Strong knowledge base/professional skill set – better level of talent than most of the rest of the country
-High per capita education level
Threats:
-How does John Gottseger’s commission work with Joneta? Is that a conflict?
-Competition from college/universities/government (counties doing their own remote sensing, Civil Air Patrol, etc) CSU very aggressive in competing for geo work, very entrepreneurial program, works a lot with military – prison labor in GIS is huge in Colorado (CAD)
-Minimal understanding of the need for geospatial products and services in State Legislature and by high ranking political leaders (state or fed)
-Tightening of credit markets, weak economy
-Declining federal and state budgets over the next two years are going to be a big threat. GEOINT indicated this – budgets will be cut a lot over next two years, with attempt to keep as much core competency in-house as possible (cut back on services/contractors)
-Government is upping fees, taxes (airport fees, etc) taxes charged against services, new sales taxes coming.
Do not use the word INDUSTRY, VENDOR, PRODUCT on invoices/brochures or you’ll get audited and have to pay taxes. Right now Colorado doesn’t charge taxes on services, only products. Need to consider this issue on a national level too. Some states charge sales taxes on services and some don’t – but we can see this coming.
General discussion:
Palatiello reminds group: Joneta told them the Gov. wants to know about anything that would be a Barrier to jobs or retention of jobs. We want to be part of the solution, we don’t want them to feel defensive. There is an issue of the adequacy of the role of private sector on John’s council. We want to have a seat at all the appropriate tables, right now we don’t.
The sheer number of aerial imagery companies in Colorado – more than any other state. All those folks fighting for limited amount of dollars. So – is there too much competition? Is it all price competition?
Technology changes here first. LiDAR already big here.Tech early adopters.Affects business here fast.
Price of fuel hasn’t helped much either. We get priced out.
Large percent of the land in CO is federal, not local. Feds are making those decisions and they don’t care about hiring Colorado firms. Competed somewhere else, or feds are doing things internally instead of hiring out. issue: Homeland Security funds a few years ago, all went to out of state companies.
Fed, State, Local agencies are keeping it in-house. GIS, photogrammetric, remote sensing, the gamut.
Fed funded local chapters of the civil air patrol is doing aerometric mapping, because they are doing it as part of training. But this also creates trained people. So this is both a strength and a weakness. MAPPS comes at this as a weakness that the government is doing work private firms should/could do.
John – concerned about the challenge of collecting the baseline data that Joneta wants:
-# of companies– we have to come up with this
-Total employees – this will probably be easy to get if we ask the right/enough companies
-Total annual $ - very difficult to get this information from private firms, even with assurance that the info will be kept anonymous/not shared, just aggregated.
-Average annual salary – this is actually irrelevant number. Does the average really tell you anything? You need a range of salaries from entry-level to CEO
If you don’t have an accurate list, you can’t get an accurate level of help. We have a challenge to create a master list of who we survey!
Rich Serby says if you don’t have 100+ companies participating then the data is not accurate. Responses from companies with 10 employeesvs 1000 employees, can really skew the results – how do you weigh the numbers? Serby says sometimes he will weigh the numbers based on his own experience. Tries to keep it within reality calculators: 500 employees is a large company in GIS.Considered a small company in the US at large. Have to factor out biases.
John says MAPPS gets so much participation in surveys that their 3rd party survey company is amazed. But we don’t ask for financial information because firms are really reluctant. This is a real challenge.
We can preface the survey with a definition of geospatial. You can ask for how many employees do you have who are involved in activities that involve geo. And not total revenues, but how much in revenues from geo?
We need to create the # of companies, though. To get the right companies to survey.
Serby - use a general calculator with companies reluctant to share information: 10 employees say you’re making $1m. MAPPS community – employees make a lot more, so that system is off by a considerable amount.
For Joneta’s purposes: she wants a footprint of what this does to the state’s economy.