r/gis • u/lucasnessmonster GIS Software Engineer • 3d ago
General Questions What's your relationship with IT?
I've noticed that there can be friction between IT and GIS, especially since GIS is so tech-focused that it encourages users to build and automate. How do you navigate with your IT department so that you can build software without too much oversight but also without inadvertently creating a shadow IT?
I myself actually sit in my company's IT department. We are a team of developers focused entirely on supporting Enterprise GIS. We work well with our GIS department since most of us have GIS backgrounds ourselves.
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u/saberhagens 3d ago
There should be a GIS person in every IT department that services a larger amount of GIS users. There is too much back end maintenance that needs/should be happening and if you have a lot of users and no one coordinating with the people who run the servers and tech, its a recipe for disaster. Ask me how I know lol
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u/mfc1__ GIS Developer 3d ago edited 3d ago
I worked at a place that had two GIS teams, a “business” team doing the bespoke analysis and mapping as required by the business. And I was on the IT GIS team, we managed the ArcGIS Enterprise deployment the Businesses GIS team and other employees used and were totally hands off the data. We ran separate dev/test/prod ArcGIS Deployments that hosted the data and services that the general public used, a high volume e-commerce app.
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u/wicket-maps GIS Analyst 3d ago
I'm the GIS person forward with my (local gov) employer's road crew. My relationship with the central GIS (a part of IT) is very cordial, my relationship with the rest of IT is a tire fire. Right now a GIS-based asset management system relies on iPads for field data collection and the management of them is very contentious (we would like more direct control so we can see if a tablet is dropped by the management software, they seem to think we're peasants who can't be trusted with anything more than a calculator) and we're about one bad week away from developing a shadow IT.
I'm in agreement with your "should" but IT people in general need to have respect for their customers, and an attitude that they're here to enable rather than hold back the organization's goals.
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u/jackjohnson0611 2d ago
What sort of GIS skills should an IT person know?
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u/saberhagens 2d ago
Basic ones, what's a geodatabase/shapefile. How to google the issue and help troubleshoot the end user if there is no other person to help. How to open arcpro and do license updating. If its a company supporting an enterprise license, having some overlap between the programmers and the GIS folks helps a lot too.
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u/maptechlady 3d ago
I am in IT, but my position is specifically GIS support at my organization (to any degree). Here are my 2 cents:
Our relationships here are rather positive! A lot of that is because I encourage people to do whatever they want in terms of ArcGIS and GIS software that we're able to support. We are lucky in that we have enough resources for everyone, so I don't have to do a lot of monitoring (we still have 1600+ accounts, so take that for what it's worth)
The only issues I ever really run into is the level of digital dexterity/digital literacy that people have these days is pretty low compared to what it used to be. I've been working with GIS since 2006, and for the most part, had to learn how to troubleshoot and fix issues on my own.
But a lot of users these days will run into an issue and it's automatically "broken" and they won't do any work on their own to try and resolve it. They won't try Googling it, looking for a YouTube video, or anything. Some people are all about trying new things and will do a lot of experimenting before reaching out to me for help - but that is starting to get few and far between these days.
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u/Mirror-Candid 2d ago
One of my staff members bought me a T-shirt for my birthday. It said "Just Google It". We worked together off and on for 15 years. His first memory of me was asking someone with a technical issue if they had googled it. I said what I said 😂. I wasn't trying to be difficult or avoid helping I am always trying to empower them.
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u/maptechlady 2d ago
There is one scenario that sticks out in my mind - I have a bunch of custom tutorial videos and instructional guides that I've made specifically for our processes. I had a user email me once with a question that was pretty straight forward, and while I was writing a reply she emailed me back and was like "I watched your video and solved my problem on my own!"
It made my whole week.
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u/Embarrassed_Flan7600 3d ago
Too many times, when GIS related projects/products fall under IT sponsorship, the project specifications and success criteria are written from an IT perspective and not from the business need. The result is a "successful" project that doesn't address the original need.
Successful GIS projects with high end user utilization usually are the result of IT serving as the facilitator. Don't even get me started on third party IT integrators. Lol
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u/Mega_Lungfish 3d ago
They can take my AGOL admin rights from my cold dead hands I'm not letting those goofballs in my domain
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u/Better_Goose_431 3d ago
The IT guy has the office next to mine. He yells into the phone every time he takes a call. Thus concludes my relationship with IT
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u/GIS_LiDAR GIS Systems Administrator 3d ago
I have a very broad job, but practically I am a GIS sysadmin. I basically translate GIS developer and user needs to what the normal sys admins need. I have also earned the trust of both sides that I can spar with them. I work at a university, so we do need to have a flexible IT department, but I don't get the pushback from them because I understand VMs, containers, networking, storage, databases, and DNS. My GIS users also know I know the GIS side of things and can solve the systems things they don't understand.
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u/Good-Bandicoot-2152 3d ago
I used to be in IT so im able to bridge the gap a bit. Thay said, our IT leaves a LOT to be desired so there is friction between them and the rest of the company, it feels like.
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u/Fine-Midnight-7970 2d ago
My organization, a city government, hired a consultant to audit the IT department. When I told them I managed and ran my department's GIS stack in the cloud without IT's blessing, they told me "it's not rogue if it's funded." One of the best lessons I have learned.
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u/geo_walker 3d ago
I work for a state agency and we have our own in house GIS IT department. We work well together and I understand why they gatekeep certain things from us. Part of the challenge is that the department is short staffed with people leaving all the time so a lot of projects have gotten bottlenecked with reduced resources and loss of institutional knowledge. The relationship with the state IT agency is a whole other thing.
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u/Backstab_Bill 3d ago
Delecate balance. You dont want to gatekeep and the business needs to be able to create what they require, but it all needs to adhere to integration/security policies etc.
Imo anything created thats used more widely than a small team should have some form of IT oversight or guidance. Even if its just at a surface level. This way when the inevitable support requests come through it isn't a big deal.
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u/Mirror-Candid 2d ago
Well then your shop is a dream shop.
I work in the Federal Government. I'm a 30 year GIS professional. I've worked as a contractor for DoD and in the private sector. Even had a stint at ESRI.
I'm now the boss of a small GIS Team for the past 4 years.
My two most rewarding and successful jobs have been when we had a dedicated IT staff just for the GIS team.
I don't need my IT staff to be GEO Pros, but I need them to be GEO aware and understand that there will be exceptions to the policies.
I'm lucky that over my career I've almost always been a bridge connecting IT to GIS. Because as the OP pointed out the sheer amount of automation necessitates.
As the boss, I mandate that all my Geo staff also have elevated privileges. They share responsibility with managing user account access and installing and ensuring security of applications and plugins that they will need to accomplish their jobs.
This also allows me to have a leaner team. But doesn't negate the risks of someone departing with vast knowledge and skills.
When I was promoted I had to hire my replacement. It took 2 years! I ended up hiring a geo naive candidate. Huge risk but their potential was strong and everyday I'm amazed. I could do this because my staff act as a RAID. If I lose one the others can fill in the pieces.
The same is true when we talk about developers.
I don't need my code writers to be GEO Pros. I do need them teamed up with the pros. I need the Pros to tell the developers what right looks like. Very early in my career I had a job just like this. I could walk the developer through my Python scripts and show them inputs / outputs and the exceptions. Then he could covert that to C# or VB. I would tease him all the time at how few lines of Python accomplished the same things and he would show me up with his error handling and integration 😂.
I'll finish with this: I will take an team that has good collaboration and communication skills anyday over being experts with something to prove. The alternative is just frustration. Working hand in hand promotes innovation as when you have siloed roles you'll have stagnation.
Ok one last thing. Really think before you customize. It's so hard to upgrade and or replace staff who have customized.
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u/Kyky_Geek 3d ago
I’m IT and have some verrry green GIS peeps (we pay shit) so… they get tiring sometimes haha but I love them the same as all my users. I make sure they have everything they need but the thing is, a multi server enterprise and agol with distributed collab and like a hundred consumers/users is way over their head and they get scared to move.
The joke from my employees is “engineering called and need you to do their job again” 🙄😅
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u/Geog_Master Geographer 3d ago
At this point, I don't. My work computer is unlocked so I can do just about anything to it, and I use my personal machine for most work. They won't do anything for the other machines I'm responsible for.
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u/throwawayhogsfan 3d ago
If it’s something that is never going to be exposed outside the organization IT pretty much lets me do my thing.
If it’s anything public facing then I follow the vendor recommended guidelines and ask the IT Department to bless me with their approval.
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u/piratecheese13 3d ago
Unfortunately, my business is my CFO my CEO and me, and my CFO and CEO do consulting work
I’m gis but I’m also ap/ar/csr/dispatch/hr
And IT
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u/ComprehensiveAd7172 3d ago
Agencies should have GIS analysts. The central enterprise GIS group should be part of OIT. It makes supporting enterprise GIS much easier when you have direct access to your network group.
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u/r0ckypebbles GIS Analyst 3d ago
State govt here. I’m a GIS admin but our agency’s IT department manages our installations and software updates. We have a main guy in the department that assists with Esri stuff and has gotten a feel for what we need. He has a license for Pro and whatnot in case he needs to troubleshoot but he doesn’t really do GIS. we have him as an admin for MyEsri too, and he’s in the loop on our annual invoice so he knows what Esri products we pay for and how they’re used and he assists with our enterprise stuff as needed. Like I use streetmap premium and he handles the quarterly installations/updates of it because I can’t download it myself. Works out decent tbh. 😊
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u/the_dalailama134 3d ago
We actually got into IT. Our core GIS is within IT and we have all domain access others have now. Of course that means we maintain our servers and databases and everything but we love it. We do have "users* in other departments though that are planners, technicians, etc.
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u/Ok_Finger7484 3d ago
its an interesting question and - a lot of it depends upon two questions
- What is your GIS resource?
- What is your IT department?
The best setup ive seen - is where the 'IT' department is 'Information Services'.
Information Services is much broader than just 'IT' - so it includes things such as Data Engineering or Data Science, and other business related information services. And of course, infrastucture support, architects, business analysts, change managers, application developers.
GIS - again - depending upon what they do - fits quite nicely into Information Services.
Living with a team that does things like application support, or infrastructure support - gives you a much much broader appreciation of what you are doing, how you can scale what you are doing.
The least successful GIS teams - that ive seen - are the ones that don't sit within IT. Unless the GIS team is purely map making and desktop jockying - any delivery of other end user capability - IMO - should be run through Information Services based methodologies.
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u/joker231 GIS Project Manager 3d ago
I manage the gis side of our servers and administration of the software along with the SQL DB and troubleshooting as necessary. Anything involving IT is usually IT centered items like firewall, server backups, etc. We have arcgis monitor setup (configured by me) that monitors all his services. IT has monitoring as well that monitors things like disc capacity, ram usage, etc. We manage things side by side in other words.
It also helps that I have an IT background with GIS. So that definitely helps the coordination between the two teams.
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u/paul_h_s 2d ago
I'm part of the IT Departmen of my city. My Job is to help the people using GIS in the City. From installs, Hardware Selection, Server Maintance, Licensing and sometime reals GIS Work mostly when it comes to usage of AI (Image Classification and first projects with LLMs).
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u/NightFeisty1164 GIS Manager 2d ago
I sit in IT and co-manage all of the geospatial technology. I own the budgets/contracts for the GIS infrastructure, architect, and even get my hands dirty in network and firewall issues.
Sure there is some friction but being the bridge has its perks.
When I'm not managing the team or deep in cloud and data center and ArcGIS enterprise stuff I still have my pet GIS projects, big ones, multi-year ones, and ones that keep me engaged in geography.
My team also handles the org R&D for GIS - rapid prototyping we call it. Ultimately we are internal contractors working for everyone.
Never a dull moment.
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u/GNRevolution 2d ago
In most jobs I've had a good relationship with IT, particularly with DBAs on which we rely heavily. My most recent job however, there is no relationship with IT, they refuse to interact, and constantly make changes that screw without any consultation. It's infuriating but my every attempt to build a relationship with them is disregarded or rebuffed. It's no wonder we are constantly having to work in spite of IT, not because of them.
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u/Maperton GIS Specialist 2d ago
The senior IT guy calls me trouble. But we get along pretty well. Word is he tried to steal me from planning. We contract with a vendor to keep/support GIS in the cloud so local IT is strictly non GIS stuff.
I was IT in both my first job ever and my first job out of college so I can do basic troubleshooting for both me and others in my department. I think IT appreciates me taking the low hanging fruit off their plate. One of our code enforcement officers is a bit of a technical dunce who is afraid of IT so he’s always coming to me for help.
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u/gwoad GIS Developer 2d ago edited 2d ago
I build GIS software for a company that sells GIS and other analytical data. Our IT manager is the database administrator, he oversees a guy who does most of the data management and a guy who does all of the IT specific VM management, user access etc.
We build some lightweight software that acts as a point of sale for the data and other software products that act as a suite of much heavier desktop applications for analytics.
We all have scrum together and if I was in need of some change in the way data is served or shaped or if I needed new VM I could ask but other than that software more or less does our own thing. For the work we do we are an exceptionally small company though.
Currently the stuff I do is viewed as relatively high priority so I can ask for whatever I need but am rarely asked to help with data or IT related stuff. Before I was moved to this project I would often be asked to write internal tooling for them or do more advanced network setup stuff (Federated ArcGIS Enterprise setup was the last project I had from them).
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u/prizm5384 GIS Analyst 3d ago
In local gov so ymmv, but our IT team is pretty hands off from our GIS stuff and we have a good relationship with them. Probably 90% of our interactions are just“hey, a new version of [software] came out, can you remote in to my computer and update it?”. They gave us slightly elevated permissions so we can run scripts, they do all the SSO stuff for our Enterprise/AGOL, and they maintain our on prem server, but that’s mostly it tbh.