By Annemarieke de Bruin
Abstract:
In the 1980’s and 1990’s GIS matured as a technology (Clarke, 1999). Geo-information technology made large impacts on our society. Many organizations benefit from this technology but the widespread adoption of GI-technology will however, disadvantage small, local organizations that have limited access to this technology relative to other stakeholders, as well as limited resources for making use of this technology in legislative, financial, or other settings (Fox et al, 2005). Governmental subsidies for example can be influenced by the precision of analogue versus digital data. Organizations dealing with spatial issues have incorporated GI-technology into their organization but these GI-systems often fail to deliver the expected benefits.
In the socio-technical view an information system of an organization should not be viewed as only hard- and software but should include people. However, people often have high level, vague, and generally unhelpful requirements (Coley Consulting, 2006). The working hypothesis is that the assessment of geo-information requirements helps to bridge the gap between the technology and the requirements of stakeholders and consequently will increase the successfulness of the implementation of GI technology in organizations. In this research, an assessment was done of the geo-information requirements of two organizational stakeholders involved in the management of a private land property called Appel-Zuid. The study area is situated in between Nijkerk and Putten in the Province of Gelderland. In this property, three parties manage the nature areas. The administrator’s office Witte, an organization called Bosgroep Midden Nederland and the government.
The method used to assess the geo-information requirements of the stakeholders was developed based on two assumptions. Firstly, participation of stakeholders will improve the usability of a possible outcome. Secondly, it is structured around the hypothesis that there exists a development of requirements. An iterative and dynamic cycle was developed in which the second loop of the process is based on the outcomes of the first. The phases in the cycle are identification, feasibility, implementation and evaluation. Prototyping was used to help potential users determine their requirements (Reeve and Petch, 1999).