The Departmental Turn

GIS technology is increasingly mature. The harder questions facing local government are now governance, evidence, integration and staffing — and those are leadership decisions, not vendor decisions.

This report examines how GIS is moving from a mapping platform run by a single team to departmental infrastructure that planning, permitting, public works and executive leadership all depend on: what the architecture looks like in practice, what real implementations have delivered, where the claims outrun the evidence, and what a city or county should ask before the next investment.