An exemplary SDI: York Region’s YorkInfo Partnership

August 10, 2020

Gordon Plunkett

The Regional Municipality of York (the Region) in Ontario recently won the Esri President’s Award for their data-informed decision-making initiative called the YorkInfo Partnership. This partnership embodies the people, processes and technologies of a spatial data infrastructure (SDI), allowing the Region to efficiently operate a geographically large regional government and provide first-rate services to the Region’s residents and businesses. In this blog post, Gordon Plunkett assesses how the key performance indicators of an SDI were evaluated for the YorkInfo Partnership. Read on to learn what makes the YorkInfo Partnership an exemplary model of how to design, implement and operate a world-class SDI.

The Region was recently chosen by Esri founder and president Jack Dangermond to receive his prestigious 2020 President’s Award. This is the highest honour given by Esri and recognizes an organization that uses data-informed decision-making to impact the world in a positive way. The Region was chosen from hundreds of organizations worldwide for their innovative use of GIS technology. But there are thousands of organizations in Canada successfully using GIS and many times that number around the world. I was wondering what set the Region’s initiative apart from everyone else, and why they are leading the world in providing data to decision makers. So, I started investigating.

One of the primary reasons for the Region’s selection for the President’s Award was the YorkInfo Partnership initiative, which set the Region apart from other organizations in the award rankings. The Partnership connects all the government organizations within the Region into a distributed environment and gives every organization access to each other’s digital assets (data, applications, tools and training). This is known as a federated approach, which means that organizations within the Region can share resources across their independent networks to optimize resource use, improve the quality of service and reduce costs. Does this not sound like the implementation of an SDI? I thought so, and subsequently I decided to perform my own SDI assessment of the YorkInfo Partnership to see for myself.

First, a little background on the government structure of the Region. It is made up of nine cities and towns and provides services to 1.2 million residents. Regional municipalities were created in Ontario in highly populated areas where it was considered more efficient to provide certain services over a larger geographic area encompassing more than one local municipality. Services are provided to Region residents and businesses in this two-tier government structure via what are sometimes referred to as upper-tier and lower-tier municipalities. Services such as water, police and paramedic services, waste management, economic development and transit are provided by the regional government. Other services are provided locally by the town or city governments.

The Regional Municipality of York stretches from the northern border of the City of Toronto up to Lake Simcoe. It is administered by a regional government comprised of nine towns and cities and is part of the Greater Toronto Area.

A regional government like the Region would be an ideal candidate for sharing geospatial data and services in an SDI. The YorkInfo Partnership has now surpassed every other organization in the world, so let’s do an evaluation to see why. However, you can’t do an SDI assessment without an evaluation framework. I’ve used different SDI evaluation frameworks in the past, but this time around, I decided to use the cursory SDI evaluation criteria that were used by Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) to assess the Arctic SDI. Even though the Arctic SDI is an international SDI and the YorkInfo Partnership is a regional (local) SDI, the same criteria apply.

The Arctic SDI evaluation was based on seven key performance indicators (KPIs), which were:

Organizational readiness
Capacity building
Information infrastructure
Primary SDI geoportal
Contributing geoportals
Data and information
Standards

I evaluated the YorkInfo Partnership against these criteria and their sub-components. Here is what I came up with.

No.	KPI	Sub-component Evaluation Criteria	YorkInfo Partnership	Grade
1	Organizational readiness	Governance Strategy Human resources Community development Performance management Authoritative framework Funding arrangements Management	The YorkInfo Partnership has mastered coordination, cooperation and collaboration across multiple member organizations.	A+
2	Capacity building	Outreach Capacity strengthening	The YorkInfo Academy is available and includes learning opportunities and training material. In-person courses to enhance data and analytics skills and relevant webinars are offered.	A+
3	Information infrastructure	Reliable infrastructure Technical infrastructure transfer environment	Participants publish their digital assets by registering them within the Coop, which makes each asset available for others to find and use. Assets aren’t physically copied into a central server but remain managed and stored behind the firewall of each partner’s domain.	A+
4	York Region geoportal	Access Data transmission Services Geoportal development	The YorkInfo Partnership portal provides: Data, which is made available by YorkInfo Partners under a common data sharing agreement. Apps, including purpose-built partner apps that users can share and download, as well as an app template for development. Tools, including partner-built code and workflows that will simplify work. An academy, which increases staff capabilities through in-person workshops and recorded webinars. Legacy portals, which are still enabled.	A+
5	Municipal-level geoportals	National geoportals Community geoportals	The Region’s towns and cities provide geoportals that interoperate with the YorkInfo Partnership portal. Examples include Markham, Vaughan, Richmond Hill, Whitchurch–Stouffville and Aurora.	A+
6	Data and information	Reference datasets Relevant thematic datasets Non-spatial information Community geoportals	The Region provides a number of types of data sets and open data to the public. Available data include demographic, housing, child development and community statistics.	A+
7	Standards	Data standards Web services standards Data exchange standards Technology standards	The Region uses data and services standards to maintain interoperability across the Region.	A+

The Region gets very high marks for their SDI based on this and every other evaluation matrix, so it’s not surprising that they won the Esri President’s Award. The Region continues to develop their YorkInfo Partnership for data and app sharing across the Region. It is quite clear that they have addressed all the issues related to building, developing and operating a successful SDI and it’s also quite clear why it is a world-class initiative and deserves the 2020 Esri President’s Award.

The Esri President's Award is personally chosen by Esri president and founder Jack Dangermond. It is the highest honour given for an organization, recognizing one organization annually that uses data-driven decision-making to impact the world in a positive way.

Congratulations to the Regional Municipality of York and the nine municipalities in the Region for winning this prestigious award. It is well deserved!

This post was translated to French and can be viewed here.