What Value do you put on your Industry Expert/Consultant

Hiring and firing is never easy. OGSpace recalls the experiences of a consultant who was hiring a GIS intern. There was only one interview slated for this position. The consulting was hoping that the hiring process would be easy. The intern made some lasting marks on the consultant. During the interview, the intern made the comment “I am excited to getting in on the ground floor of GIS.”  The consultant chuckled and rebuffed him saying, “I must have started in the bowels of the parking garage if we are just on the ground floor”

A majority of exploration and production companies, GIS may have got its start in a Land Group or Midstream Group. Usually GIS operated totally separate from geography and geophysics departments. However, GIS still lacks a solid identity.

OGSpace believes that there is a strong need for an industry expert to advise on this issues. This role is not different compared to what lawyers or accountants do. Industry experts provide advice on the many challenges companies face as it relates to GIS. Some of these include, how many land grids are owned or leased; how many subscriptions have been made; what the objective from having access to all this data; and the duplication of capabilities between add-ons and the core functionality of the GIS toolbox.

An example of the complexity of the challenges company faces can be found in an utility company who had gone “all in” on a Facility Management platform with GIS components. The leadership of this implementation team had a diverse set of backgrounds and roles in the company. The same leadership also had their own ideas in their head what this product would do.

Consultants try to find the careful balance between the integration of tools, meeting the expectations of the client, while not upsetting the vendor(s).

In this example, the vendor was trying to resell the end-user customer NAIP imagery. The vendor’s differentiation came by way of taking the NAIP data and renaming it match to the county name, not the standard NAIP FIPS type ID. The price tag – around $500,000. The end-user customer had an expectation that the imagery was being custom collected for them. For the end-user customer, the value is clear. The role of a consultant or industry expert is to combine his/her domain experience and liaise or check the needs of the customer with the vendor to ensure that the customer’s investment is optimized and beneficial. Reconciling the monetary investment against the benefits of the solution is how consultants can help bridge the gap between vendors and customers.

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