GeoIgnite 2020 Video: Agriculture Canada’s COVID-19 Response Objectives and Key Results (OKR’s) on the Enterprise GIS Roadmap
This year Canada’s National geospatial leadership conference GeoIgnite 2020 was put online and brought the Canadian geospatial sector together virtually. One of the topics included updates from the Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) as presented by its Science and Technology Branch Manager, James Ashton.
AAFC Overcomes Challenges with Strategic Approach
In past years, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) experienced technical and business challenges. Among these challenges were the outdated infrastructure, changes in the organizational management structure and a general lack of awareness of the existing availability and capabilities AAFC has for delivering location intelligence solutions. Geospatial activities in the organization needed to more succinctly demonstrate the value of location intelligence platforms to executives. In this video, James Ashton discusses how they resolved these challenges by adopting a maturity model or framework and creating Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) and a digital Road Map ensuring a focused and measurable approach to AAFC’s enterprise geospatial efforts.
The Slimgim Maturity Model
Paul Giroux developed the Slimgim maturity model, which is licensed Creative Commons and shared freely with the community. As the founder of Mass Maturity, Inc., he helps organizations take their Slimgim assessments to the next level with a unique methodology, tools and templates designed to data-drive the development of enterprise GIS strategic roadmaps. Paul provides background information regarding the model structure, methods, philosophy and movement in this video. The AAFC example is used to show fundamental components such as the roadmap consisting of concise and measurable objectives and key results and a spreadsheet that is used to assess progress and operational performance. The resulting roadmap is designed to provide a clear path and guidance for achieving these objectives through a process of continual improvement.
Application of the maturity model at AAFC during the pandemic
During this COVID-19 pandemic season, production and distribution of agricultural food in the country are being affected. However, these events have provided an opportunity for the AAFC to test the Slimgim framework and to resolve its organizational challenges. The key result is a centralized GIS Hub that features uninterrupted data provision for each AAFC branch to perform its specific duties. Likewise, this dataset is also being used by the AAFC to generate analytic system about the country’s food assets, agricultural food labour distribution, food transportation, vulnerable population during the pandemic and trends and developments on food supplies, distribution and scarcity.
Watch the video below to learn more about the AAFC initiatives for the agricultural sector, and how the Slimgim maturity framework works to generate promising key results for your organization.
2020 GeoIgnite video link: Agriculture Canada’s COVID-19 Response Objectives and Key Results (OKR’s) on the Enterprise GIS Roadmap
