USA65: How a City Municipality Resilience Program Camouflaged GIS Dashboards as Enterprise Architecture Coherence

Sunil Dutt Jha
Jul 24
1 min read

Updated: 4 days ago

Overview:

This case is part of a 100-diagnostic series revealing how US municipalities have mislabeled situational awareness tools as “Enterprise Architecture progress.”

In urban resilience initiatives, a recurring pattern is treating GIS-driven climate and risk dashboards as evidence of architectural coherence.

Maps showed flood zones, power outage areas, and emergency service coverage in real time — yet the enterprise structure linking city planning, utility coordination, emergency response, and recovery programs was never modeled.

P1–P6 Insight Preview:

P1 (Strategy): Dashboards were positioned as part of a “smart resilience” vision, but no architectural roadmap tied them to measurable recovery speed, service continuity, or cross-agency accountability.

P2 (Process): Hazard monitoring workflows were defined, but incident escalation and post-event recovery remained fragmented across agencies.

P3 (System): GIS tools integrated poorly with asset management, emergency dispatch, and utility control systems; no unified behavior model existed.

P4 (Component): Sensor feeds, mapping software, and reporting modules operated under separate vendor agreements with no common governance.

P5 (Implementation): Rollouts focused on visual accuracy and refresh speed, leaving systemic inter-agency process fixes out of scope.

P6 (Operations): Business ops could see threats faster, but tech ops juggled incompatible data streams; neither could ensure coordinated action across departments.

Stakeholder Impact Mapping:

CEO/Mayor: Feels P1 — great optics and press coverage, but resilience KPIs haven’t improved.
CIO: Feels P3 & P4 — integration complexity keeps growing as more feeds are added.
Sales Head (Public-Private Partnerships): Feels P2 & P5 — can’t prove ROI to partners without integrated post-event reporting.
Chief EA: Feels P1–P6 — visibility without structure leaves the city vulnerable.
Head of Emergency Management: Feels P2, P3, & P6 — still calls multiple control rooms to coordinate during a crisis.