In the late Spring of 2020, the Region received word from Esri President, Jack Dangermond,
that York Region would receive the President’s Award for GIS.
What a wonderful acknowledgement of our incredibly talented team.
Together, working with our partners, we are connecting our world here in York Region.
The Regional Municipality of York is one of the fastest growing and most diverse communities
in Canada.
Our 1.2 million residents live in nine local cities and towns and speak over 120 different
languages.
Staff support York Region by driving insights through trusted data and are helping lead
a digital transformation across the region.
They are ultimately contributing to York Region’s mission of working together to serve our thriving
communities, today and tomorrow.
My view is that York Region is really leading in GIS in a wide variety of areas including
collaboration.
What York has been incredibly successful at doing is connecting the local governments
to the regions and integrating information across those municipalities.
I’m thrilled that they’ve been given this award because I think that it’s a reflection
that they are ahead of the rest of the world in this level of collaboration – which is
not easy to do.
It really is the governance that’s the hardest part.
So, it’s a real lighthouse, not just for other regional governments and other municipalities,
but to the entire GIS community across Canada.
Most municipal data is connected to geography so it was a natural progression for our GIS
group to take on a corporate data governance roll beyond just spatial data.
Data drives business intelligence and informed decision-making.
Analytics and visualization help us ask and answer questions, model and predict outcomes,
and tell our story to council and residents.
GIS gives us a platform that allows us to collaborate, bringing science and data together
to tackle problems in whole new ways to inform better decisions.
The Esri Conference theme, “GIS - Interconnecting Our World” – reflects our long-held focus
on collaboration and partnership.
Two examples of how the Region is interconnecting their world through collaboration are the
YorkInfo Partnership and the DATA Coop.
About 25 years ago, the Region's municipalities, conservation authorities and school boards
established the YorkInfo Partnership to maximize their collective investment in data, analytics
and GIS technology.
Their many shared services require coordination, and this starts with data.
The partnership has helped build GIS “muscle” throughout the region, established a “single
source of the truth” for regional data, and has led to broad corporate applications.
The Partnership’s most recent innovation - the DATA Co-op - leverages out-of-the-box
Esri technology and is like an online marketplace.
Partners discover and exchange data, applications, technology tools, and the academy for training.
In less than six months, the partnership established roles and responsibilities for content sharing
and made it easy for everyone, regardless of size or budget, to participate.
So it allows organizations to reach out and connect to each other and share.
Share their data but also share their analytics and share their strategies and collaborate
with each other in a much more effective fashion than they ever could have before.
As GIS professionals, we have a lot to offer our organizations.
We understand data.
We know how to bring data together and how to analyze it.
And we know how to visualize it and build stories around the results.
We are also natural collaborators.
We accomplish so much more when we work together.
Now, perhaps more than ever, our organizations need us to step forward, to collaborate, to
leverage our data, and make the most of our technology.
By putting in place policies, mechanisms and systems that enable data sharing and access,
we’re encouraging collaboration, building trust in the data, developing business intelligence
– all with the goal of improving understanding and decision-making.
We need to bring our insights from the map room to the board room.
I welcome you to work with us to put data and science to work.
We are happy to share our achievements, learn more from you, and together show how GIS helps
to interconnect our world.