Requirements Gathering

No two clients are alike and no two implementations of geospatial technologies are alike. While the base technology is relatively stable, NSGIS performs user needs assessments to determine the amount and quality of available map and non-map data, the state of a client’s IT infrastructure and support, the client’s priority in regards to data and software tools, the client’s stance on access and cybersecurity, and other systems that are available for integration.

NSGIS assists clients to prioritize their needs by providing estimations of cost, schedule and difficulty, and helps clients to align these needs with organization business priorities, and typically produces a requirements specification document and an implementation plan. Requirements gathering is typically the first stage of actual implementation at a client’s organization, and can either be scoped as a separate project, or scoped as the first phase of actual implementation.

NSGIS recommends that this phase – the “design phase” – be priced separately from the implementation, since it is often only at the end of this phase that the client really comes to know what it wishes to implement.