Esri Ireland selected to participate in a new Office of Government Procurerment multi-supplier framework for Open Data services

Following a procurement process run by the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform on behalf of the wider Public Service, we are delighted to announce that Esri Ireland have been selected to participate in a Multi-Supplier Framework for the Provision of Technical Assistance and Support on the Implementation of Ireland’s Open Data Initiative for Public bodies in Ireland.

You can read more about this announcement here.

Under Ireland’s Open Data Initiative and as set out in Ireland’s Open Data Strategy 2017-2022 launched on July 14th 2017 following Government approval, public bodies are to identify and publish appropriate datasets on the web as Open Data which can be linked to the national Open Data Portal at data.gov.ie.
The Initiative aims to create an environment where, by opening up Government data, new opportunities for research, innovation, transparency, engagement and greater efficiency are delivered and realised by all.

The Framework includes technical assistance and support for the following aspects of Open Data:

• Open Data Management
• Auditing data
• Data publishing
• Linking data
• Use Case analysis
• Data analytics
• Development of visualisation tools and visualisation applications

All across the world organisations are turning to Geographical Information Systems (GIS) as a platform for open data management, with a focus on sharing and engaging around that data. In their December 2016 report entitled “Market Guide for Government and Open Data Management Platforms”, Gartner outlined a number of key strategic planning assumptions regarding the procurement and maintenance of open government data initiatives.

In that report, Gartner recognised that many government agencies are introduced to the concept of open data publication through geospatial data, and that GIS continues to act as a primary centralising data source for organisations “Esri Ireland work on a daily basis with many Public bodies to provide enterprise solutions that integrate data across many agencies for both external and internal consumers”, said Michael Byrne, Key Account Manager at Esri Ireland. 

Byrne continued; “As such, our team will bring to this Framework the capability to deal with the challenges facing open data providers in the public sector, namely ensuring that: data generation becomes coupled with extraction and publication; data is managed in a way to prevent the requirement to store in countless ways (medium, format, location etc.); data generated from legacy systems in many locations are either combined, or are moved from legacy systems to centralised approaches; data is never considered for just one purpose, but that broader sharing and usage is central to any data project”.

For further information on utilising this Framework, please contact opendata@per.gov.ie; or speak with a member of our team via mapsmakesense@esri-ireland.ie