The COVID-19 Pandemic and GIS Lessons Learned

I never thought I would personally experience something catastrophic like the Coronavirus Pandemic. This has been a wake-up call for most of us. Though the pandemic is far from over, I thought it would be valuable to document some of the GIS lessons learned from this disaster that I have observed. 

Everything about the pandemic is spatial. Epidemiology has historically been one of the driving forces behind the development and use of mapping and spatial analytics. As this article from CityLab shows, the first occurrence of disease mapping was in 1692 related to a plague outbreak in Italy, that continued in 1797 related to a yellow fever epidemic in New York City, and was followed by visualization and mapping for cholera outbreaks in Paris and London in the mid-19th century.

The Coronavirus pandemic is no different. It started in December 2019 in Wuhan, China and in just six months has spread to nearly every country on the planet and has become the number one issue across all of humanity. Rarely have so many been united in a single struggle against a common foe. Lesson learned: This is our time to shine, so get out there and join the fight. Now, more than ever, your colleagues, your neighbors and the rest of your community need your help. So proactively get out there and search for ways to assist. If not within your organization, then in the community. There are many options for this including this blog post on how your GIS department can respond and the URISA GISCorps.

When you are trying to assist your organization and community in this time of need, you want to make sure to utilize your existing relationships. You should already have good working relationships with the managers and leaders in your organization. They should know that you are a reliable source for business-driven, innovative spatial solutions. If not, then this is the lesson learned: during a disaster, you do not want to have to establish new relationships and educate people on who you are and how you can help. All the leaders in your organization should know you, respect you and understand the value you can provide to them, the organization and the community.

If you do not have existing relationships with the leaders in your organization, you need to reach out to them and explain to them the value of what you can provide. This requires a different way to communicate, you cannot talk about technology. You must focus on ways that you can help them realize their vision and reduce their pain. For more information see this blog post.

Easy-to-use mapping and spatial data visualization and analysis apps are powerful tools in providing situational awareness. Dashboards are some of the most impactful apps that you as a GIS practitioner can deploy because they provide value to non-GIS users and get them to become GIS users. They provide critical decision-making information based on the latest data. While there are multiple COVID-19 dashboards out there, one has risen to the top, the dashboard from the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. This was one of the first publicly available, real-time dashboard apps dedicated to monitoring the pandemic.

Lesson learned: The modern GIS recipe of low-code/no-code Commercial-Off-The-Shelf configurable apps powered by the geospatial cloud has been proven to be the best way to provide valuable technology solutions in a short time to a huge audience. As soon as the pandemic began to spread, agencies across the globe quickly stood up real-time, focused web apps without having to write code and/or power them with their own infrastructure. You can see over 370 examples here in the U.S. and over 260 elsewhere across the globe. These engagement portals, dashboards, and other apps can be set up in hours and days, instead of weeks or months. That is a crucial element when dealing with such an important, fast-moving issue like the pandemic. Another point is that these apps are literally viral and attract an immense number of views that cannot be supported by normal infrastructure, the Johns Hopkins dashboard has gotten over a billion views in a day. The use of SaaS and the cloud is a must.

This brings to light another lesson learned: keeping your enterprise GIS up to date is especially critical when it comes to taking advantage of the best and latest tech in an emergency. When pressed into service to serve a large community in a life and death situation is no time to be trying to learn and/or deploy new technology. Those organizations that were already up to date with their enterprise GIS were able to quickly respond using the data, methods and processes they were familiar with. Those whose enterprise GIS’s were behind the times, found it much more difficult to provide value in a short span of time and in a reliable manner. There have been numerous stories of how outdated government systems are letting down their citizens at the time they need support the most. You can read just one right here.

If your enterprise GIS is not up to date, then a great place to start to learn how to bring it up to date and keep it updated is by reading and following the best practices outlined in this document and video.

Here is my last lesson learned: this is a great opportunity to push digital transformation into overdrive. With everyone singularly focused on the pandemic, now is the time to move the organization forward with technology as far as possible. There have been many amazing stories of this like how the city of Los Angeles, California scaled their telework solution up from 12 to 12,000 in just two weeks, or this story of how a massive five-year transformation plan was delivered in a week.

With the pressure on organizations to do more work digitally with remote work forces, the barriers to digital transformation are down, so take advantage of this to push your effectiveness across the enterprise. Once this crisis has passed, let us not let up, let us keep this pace moving forward and do it methodically, with a well-thought out and executed strategy. As this article from Forbes (How The Coronavirus Crisis Is Teaching Us A Lesson In Digital Darwinism) points out,

“But if you haven’t got round to implementing a digital strategy yet, you have a serious problem, and if you do not move quickly, your very existence could be in danger.”

If you need some information on creating a geospatial strategy for your organization, please see this document.

There is a lot to do to for all the GIS users out there that can help everyone through this tough time. It is not too late to get started on making a bigger difference in your organization and community when they need it the most. Now is our time to shine, so make the most of these lessons learned, your skills, your tools, and your opportunities to provide support as part of one of the most amazing missions in which we could ever participate.

Stay safe and healthy out there!