By Brian Brady, GISP, COO and VP Business Development, Gistic Research, Inc.

Agencies responsible for NG9-1-1 GIS data come in every size and shape: counties, cities, tribal nations, regional 9-1-1 authorities, PSAP consortia, and state programs coordinating all of the above.

Their GIS situations generally fall into two camps, and both are probably more common than most vendor marketing would lead you to believe.

The first has GIS expertise, but not enough of it. One analyst may be supporting addressing, public works, the assessor, planning, and 9-1-1. Then the 9-1-1 work comes in bursts: a validation report comes back with four hundred findings, a state deadline lands, or a neighboring jurisdiction changes a boundary.

The second has no GIS staff at all. The 9-1-1 coordinator, addressing clerk, or dispatch supervisor may be responsible for the data on top of another full-time job and rely entirely on an outside provider for anything that touches a map.

Both situations can end up in the same place.

They hire a consultant to clear the backlog. The consultant does good work, hands back a clean dataset, and leaves. Six months later, the backlog is back because the data kept changing and the fix was treated as a project instead of an ongoing process.

I want to be careful about how I say the next part because it can easily get misread.

The problem isn’t the analyst, the coordinator, or the consultant. The problem is that a lot of the software in the middle was built for a world where validation happens somewhere else, by someone else, after the fact.

Fix that, and whoever manages the data locally becomes one of the most valuable people in the process because they’re the ones who actually know the roads.

If you’re evaluating NG9-1-1 GIS software, these are the questions I’d put in the RFP regardless of the size of your agency or whether you’ve got a GIS department, one analyst, or nobody with GIS in their title.

I’ve grouped them by what each question is really trying to protect.

Protecting Your People’s Time

1. Can our own staff resolve a validation finding inside the tool, in the same session where it’s found?

One of the biggest time sinks in NG9-1-1 GIS is the round trip:

Run a report. Export the findings. Open desktop GIS. Find the record. Fix it. Re-export the data. Revalidate it.

Ask the vendor to demonstrate a finding going from detection to correction without leaving the application.

If the answer involves a second product, start counting the minutes.

And if your agency doesn’t have desktop GIS at all, that second product may not even be an option.

2. What does a new user need to know before they’re productive?

Ask for the training time in hours, not days, and ask what someone can actually accomplish after that first session.

A well-designed tool should let an addressing clerk or 9-1-1 coordinator resolve routine street-name and address-range findings without needing a GIS degree.

For an agency with a GIS professional, that frees the GIS person to focus on work that actually requires their expertise.

For an agency without one, it can be the difference between owning your data and renting access to it.

3. Which findings can the software repair on its own, and which ones require a person?

Get a specific list.

Qualifying gaps and overlaps, address-range parity, street-name normalization—these are pattern problems. A good tool should be able to handle the clear cases automatically and queue the ambiguous ones for review.

If every correction still requires a person to click through it manually, you may be buying a reporting system rather than a maintenance system.

Protecting Your Data

4. Who owns the data, and where does it live?

The answer should be simple: your agency owns the data and can export it, in full, in standard formats, whenever it wants, without having to purchase a services engagement.

Ask specifically about your local fields—the fields outside the NENA model that other departments may depend on.

Do they survive onboarding intact?

Some platforms effectively make you choose between the state schema and your own local schema.

You shouldn’t have to.

5. If a neighboring jurisdiction changes a shared boundary, how does our dataset find out?

Cross-jurisdictional errors are some of the hardest problems for an individual agency to identify because you can’t always see what’s happening on the other side of the line.

Ask whether the platform lets you see your neighbor’s edge as reference data and whether a shared-boundary problem can be identified on both sides.

For a regional or state authority, ask the opposite question:

Can you see the data health of every participating agency without taking over their editing?

6. Can we see who changed what and when—and can we undo it?

Transaction-level history with user attribution isn’t a luxury. It’s part of good data governance.

When a problem gets reviewed after the fact, one of the first questions is going to be: what did the data look like on that date, and who changed it last?

Ask the vendor to show you the history view.

Then ask them to show you how rollback works.

Protecting Your Budget

7. What’s the total price, including the things that aren’t included in the license?

Ask the vendor to itemize everything:

Platform license, per-user seats, any underlying GIS platform licenses, desktop GIS licenses the platform depends on, onboarding services, per-finding or per-fix correction services, annual revalidation, and renewal escalators.

Then ask which of those costs go up as your data or number of users grows.

The true comparison between two products is almost never just the license number.

For a small agency, this question may matter more than almost anything else because it’s usually the costs outside the basic license where a modest budget starts disappearing.

8. Does the pricing model create an incentive to leave errors in the data?

It’s an uncomfortable question, but it’s worth asking directly.

A vendor paid per correction has a structural reason to find corrections.

A vendor paid based on the population being served has a structural reason to make your staff efficient.

That doesn’t mean either model is dishonest.

But you should understand which model you’re buying.

9. What other software or licensing does the platform require?

Browser-based doesn’t automatically mean license-free.

Some browser-based NG9-1-1 GIS platforms are built on commercial GIS platforms that may still require per-user or per-seat licensing underneath the application.

Ask what software licenses are required to use the platform and whether adding users increases your licensing costs.

Also ask whether a desktop GIS product is required to complete any part of the workflow.

A platform built on open-source technology can avoid those underlying commercial GIS licensing requirements while still giving users full browser-based access without installing desktop GIS software.

For an agency with limited GIS resources, that distinction matters. You’re not just evaluating where the application runs. You’re evaluating everything you’ll need to license, install, maintain, and train people to use in order to actually get the work done.

Protecting Your Relationships

10. Can our outside provider work inside the platform alongside our staff, with the right permissions?

The way this question is framed matters.

The goal isn’t to eliminate outside expertise.

Regional GIS consultants and service providers are often exactly the right people to handle a major one-time correction, a boundary redraw, a legacy migration, or another problem that requires specialized experience.

For an agency without GIS staff, they may continue to be the right people for the hard problems indefinitely.

The goal is to stop paying an outside provider to perform routine maintenance your own people could handle if they had the right tools.

Ask whether the platform supports an integrator or contractor role—a login that lets an outside professional work inside your environment, under your ownership, while your staff can see every change they make.

That changes the relationship from dependency to partnership.

And for a small agency, it provides something that’s often been missing: visibility into work being performed on its behalf.

11. What happens to our data and workflow if we stop paying?

Ask for the exit terms in writing.

Full export. Standard formats. No ransom.

A vendor that’s confident in its product shouldn’t have any trouble answering this question.

Protecting the Mission

12. When the region cuts over to geospatial routing, what does “ready” mean in this tool, and how do we know we’re ready today instead of as of the last report?

This is really the question all the others support.

In Next Generation 9-1-1, GIS data becomes part of the routing instruction.

Readiness isn’t something you reach once and file away.

It’s something you maintain.

Ask the vendor to show you a data-health view that reflects the condition of your dataset as it exists right now—not the way it looked the last time someone generated a report.

A Note on What This Means for GIS Staff—and for Agencies That Don’t Have Any

I’ve sat in enough procurement meetings to know there’s often an unspoken concern when a tool promises that non-GIS users can maintain 9-1-1 data.

In an agency that has a GIS professional, it can sound like the GIS position is being designed out.

In an agency without one, it can sound like a promise that won’t survive contact with a real dataset.

Neither is what I’m talking about.

Tools that reduce routine maintenance can actually make a small GIS team more sustainable because they take the four hundred repetitive findings off the analyst’s desk and leave the forty that really require GIS expertise.

The analyst who’s been spending Thursdays reconciling street-name variants can spend those Thursdays working on the boundary alignment the next annexation is going to require.

Agencies that adopt this kind of tooling don’t necessarily need less GIS expertise.

They can simply stop outsourcing the work they should be able to manage themselves.

And for the agency with no GIS staff, the same tools do something different but just as important.

They put routine work within reach of the person who already knows the roads, while making the outside expert a visible partner instead of a black box.

That agency doesn’t suddenly gain a GIS department.

It gains control of its own data.

And that may be the thing it never had before.

Where We Sit

At Gistic Research, we build GIVE, and many of the questions above describe exactly what we built it to do: browser-based editing without requiring a separate commercial GIS platform or desktop GIS license, validation findings resolved within the editing session, lossless schema mapping that preserves local fields, an Integrator Role for outside professionals, a hub view for regional and state authorities, and complete transaction history.

GIVE is built using open-source technologies, which means agencies aren’t required to purchase underlying per-seat GIS licenses simply to give additional staff access to the system.

I mention that for transparency, not because it’s the point of the article.

Whatever platform you’re evaluating, ask these twelve questions and write down the answers.

The vendor’s answers will tell you a lot about whether the product was built around the needs of the agency—or around the needs of the vendor.

Brian Brady is COO and VP of Business Development at Gistic Research, Inc., which has built collaborative GIS and data-quality systems for public agencies since 2005. He writes regularly about NG9-1-1 GIS data standards and practice on LinkedIn.