Case Study: Open Space Institute achieves organization-wide access to interactive maps and self-service GIS with Esri's ArcGIS Online

Open Space Institute Gives Everyone in their Organization the Power to Visualize Data and Answer Geographical Questions

Open Space Institute (OSI), a land conservation nonprofit, relied on static PDFs and a central VPN-hosted GIS server, which made accessing up-to-date spatial data slow and generated many one-off requests to their small GIS team. To address this, OSI implemented ESRI’s ArcGIS Online (a SaaS web mapping and content management platform) to give staff browser-based access to maps and data.

Using ESRI’s ArcGIS Online and associated tools (ArcGIS Hub, ArcGIS Dashboards, ArcGIS Web AppBuilder, Survey123, Field Maps, and StoryMaps), OSI created secure group-based access, interactive dashboards, configurable web apps, and mobile data-collection workflows. The result: staff across multiple offices can self-serve current, interactive maps and answer geographic questions instantly, field data flows into the system in real time, meetings are more efficient, and a two-person GIS team now supports about 60 employees with fewer time-consuming requests.

Open Space Institute

Neil Jordan

GIS manager