Esri is offering free, virtual 45-min appointments for data health checks at the 2021 User Conference. This popular offering benefits customers in various ways. Let’s take some time to explore its importance.
What is a data health check?
Accurate data is healthy data. Healthy data is vital to any successful GIS implementation.
Data health checks help create awareness about GIS data quality control and enable our customers to have error-free data. A data health check is a service provided by an Esri industry expert, who will review and analyze your GIS data. It is free, focuses expressly on geometry/attributes and takes about 45 minutes. We will use Esri’s data quality management extension ArcGIS Data Reviewer to run diagnostics and help you evaluate overall data quality based on business rules specific to your industry.
Participating in the data health check is as easy as uploading a sample of your data in a secure folder managed by Esri. During your appointment, staff will use your own data to explain how to configure key data checks (see example checks for water and electric). Any errors detected are then reviewed with you. The error features and an Excel report outlining the accuracy rates of your data will be provided to you for additional review in the same secure folder.
Data health checks are offered for water/wastewater/stormwater, electric, gas, linear referenced pipelines, land records, addressing, street centerlines, airports (airfield infrastructure), and Indoors datasets.
Why is data quality control important?
GIS data is used to help make important decisions for your organization. The data in the GIS is being maintained and updated based on new or updated information. Analyses are performed on a routine basis. These results are used to determine the next step. When there is missing information or data in the incorrect location, it will affect the outcome of how that data is being used. Having confidence in the quality of your data is important to trust the analyses and decisions made.
Data Health Checks give you an opportunity to see how clean your GIS is by providing insight into what types of errors exist and a % accuracy of your data’s quality. By integrating quality control in your workflows, you can improve your GIS operations and avoid risks in decision making.
What problems does it solve?
Reliable data is indispensable to obtaining meaningful results. Some examples where error-free data plays a key role include:
- Migration to parcel fabric or utility network
- Analysis on geocoded data
- Connectivity issues in geometric network
- Have a network traceable dataset
- 911 dispatching system
- Have documented proof about your organization’s claims on data quality
- Reporting needs or submission of data to authoritative agency
- Understand inherited data or data from other sources
- Assess data from partners or contractors
- Integrating GIS with third party systems such as asset management
Indoors use cases include hoteling/hot-desking functionality, space planning, and integrating work order management systems or other existing information streams.
How does this apply to me?
Data quality impacts all levels of an organization. For example, the Chief Executive Officer cares about their organization’s reputation and saving resources; the Chief Information Officer is responsible for meeting compliance
What do past customers have to say about this offering?
Here are some comments from previous participants (names have been removed to protect PII).
“It is an extremely useful service provided to customers around the world to give them an initial understanding of what it will take for implementation of the Utility Network.”
“This was exactly what I was looking for to make sure I wasn’t making digitizing mistakes with my pipeline data.”
“Very worthwhile experience and data quality is of high interest at this time, so we plan to implement this soon”
“Very useful. Especially for our Polygon and attribute data (domain validation) data. Learned about special reviewer tool for Geometric Networks. Will use it back in the office.”
“Esri rep was very helpful. He listened to our history of how we got here answered all of our questions. We are feeling like we know exactly how to fix our issues.”
How do I sign up for an appointment?
If this resonates with you and you are keen on assessing the quality of your GIS data, sign up for an appointment today!
Looking forward to connect with you at UC!
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