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 Business Assessment
The U.S. Department of
Agriculture (USDA) service center concept is a cornerstone of reorganization
efforts begun under the Reorganization Act of 1994. USDA service centers will
offer high-quality "one-stop" service to customers of all service center
agencies—the Farm Services Agency (FSA), the Natural Resources
Conservation Service (NRCS), and Rural Development (RD).
For the concept of
"one-stop" service centers to succeed, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and
geospatial data need to be available across partner agencies as one integrated
system. This system must service all agencies by providing common access to
consistent data and geospatial business processes among service center
locations and partner agencies.
GIS most directly
impacts four business areas: (1) Farm and Community Programs, (2)
Eligibility/Compliance, (3) Conservation, and (4) Resource Inventory and
Assessment. However, because GIS will immensely improve service center
operations and program delivery, the impact of GIS will be experienced in all
service center business areas.
GIS improves service
center operations by eliminating spatially inaccurate and expensive paper-based
maps and information, eliminating duplicate sets of information and processes,
and providing easy online access to geospatial data. These improvements and the
service center GIS system will enable the development of reengineered business
processes that improve customer service and reduce agency costs.
Current Business Environment
The use of Geographic
Information Systems (GIS) is new to most USDA Service Centers and field
offices. Where GIS is used, each office has usually collected the geospatial
data. Many State Offices are an excellent source of data and GIS consulting,
but this varies amongst states. Some states have their own web sites or other
organized data distribution methods, whilst others do not. Many federal
agencies supply geospatial data either by an offline ordering system or by
downloading the data from their sites on the WWW. The USDA hosts web sites to
deliver soils, plants, and climatic data. However, this is currently done from
multiple web sites using different types of underlying technology, formats,
etc.
Service Centers currently
collecting geospatial data must:
- Find it
- Obtain it
- Pay for it when required
- Add it into their system
- Reformat it if necessary
- Reproject it if necessary
- Extract the relevant data
Even for an experienced
GIS user, not all of these steps are quick or easy. Finding appropriate data
can be very time consuming. In addition, not all data integration can be
performed at any site. For instance, image analysis requires expertise and very
expensive software that most organizations cannot afford.
Service Centers, other
organizations, or individuals who want to acquire USDA soils and climatic data
can currently find the data through the use of the Natural Resource Conservation Service,
National Cartography and Geospatial Center (NCGC) FGDC clearinghouse node using the site
http://fgdc.ftw.nrcs.usda.gov/NRCSgateway.html.
Data from the National
PLANTS database can be found on the site
http://plants.usda.gov/.
Four different data sets can be downloaded. They are in different formats and
one uses UNIX compression techniques. The data is not associated with a map,
but can be obtained by State and county distribution is available for a few
states.
In summary, a Service
Center or any other organization or individual must currently go to many
different web sites and/or contact many other agencies to obtain natural
resource data from the USDA or other agencies. Federal Clearinghouse nodes,
such as the NCGC node in Fort Worth, provide search capabilities and contact
information for many federal, state, and local government databases. Often the
data is available online for downloading, but frequently it is not, and the
user must still contact the agency to obtain the data.
Business Case
USDA acquires and
integrates for one purpose – to support access and delivery of this data
for use in meeting the agencies program mission.
Access and
delivery of geospatial data to service center offices, internal customers, and
external customers in support of business needs encompasses four major areas:
data warehousing, data selection, packaging, and delivery. The goals of access
and delivery in the context of this GIS Strategy include:
- Support more efficient and timely program
delivery.
- Supply greater quantity and variety of
products and services for the customer.
- Improved quality of products and services
for the customer.
- Optimize service center staff access to
resource data and information
- Strengthen partnerships within government,
research organizations, and private sector
- Encourage better use and management of data
resources
To facilitate access,
browsing, retrieval, and use of GIS data, integrated data themes are stored or
linked to a data warehouse or geospatial data servers As part of the data
warehouse, tools are provided to improve access. Data contained in these
warehouses may originate from agency collected information such as soils, be
purchased for use by USDA customers as is the case for orthoimagery, or be
linked to some data partner such as USGS. Some components of the data warehouse
include metadata catalogs, security, metrics on content and use, quality
control, data cleansing, and database optimization.
Generally
speaking, existing resource databases are not user friendly, are not available
in similar formats, and are difficult for employees and customers to access. A
data gateway is envisioned to provide a single access point for resource data
(hence the term gateway), provide a way to easily locate or select data
that exists for selected geographic areas, and delivery the data packaged in
formats compatible with commercial and Service Center applications formats.
The measure of success for
data access and delivery will be based on how "seamless" and efficient the
delivery process is for our internal and external customers. Field personnel
have consistently indicated the current level of effort associated with
locating, obtaining, formatting, and using geospatial data is unreasonable.
Likewise the field has indicated how beneficial the use of GIS can or could be
if the agencies can streamline the access and delivery process.
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