GIS Strategy

The problem

Recently, Sustainable Timber Tasmania underwent major disruptive change, including significant reductions in staff. For the GIS function, this meant a loss of corporate knowledge and a need to “do more with less”.

Mercury Project Solutions was brought in to help the team articulate a new vision for how spatial technologies could be used across the entire organisation.

Mercury’s contribution

To establish the vision we set out to develop a 5-year GIS strategy, that had a 10-year outlook. The Tasmanian timber industry presents some unique challenges from a spatial data and technology perspective, however, the scientific nature of this industry means it is open to, and often seeks, innovative solutions.

This led our strategy down two distinct and important paths:

  • optimising current technology to ensure efficiency and reliability of decision-support information; and
  • identifying emerging technology trends to further increase throughput and capacity.

Mercury Project Solutions developed the two-fold strategy, as well as a business case to assess the associated resource and cost impacts. The financial benefits to the organisation were estimated to deliver a positive return on investment after the first year, with savings forecasted at over $1.3 million annually.