Economic Development
Executive View
Top Level Objectives
Economic instability is causing unprecedented changes in operations and investments as businesses struggle to remain competitive and profitable. The impact is apparent in the increased competition between jurisdictions for businesses, jobs and government incentives.
Whether you are a Government Economic Development Executive or a Utility Executive responsible for business growth, your goal is simple - bring increased investment and jobs into their jurisdiction. Rolta's services and solutions enable you to do just that - efficiently and effectively, harnessing the power of geography.
Solution - Innovation
Rolta's Economic Development solution provides investors the ability to visualize demographics, infrastructure, and available property to select their perfect location. This allows decision makers within jurisdictions to manage the operations of an economic development agency, allocate spending on infrastructure and incentives and track progress against defined metrics on a regular basis. This solution is powered by Rolta's Geospatial Fusion Solution, providing the "wow" factor to investors with intuitive and effortless navigation. In addition, Rolta's strategic planning services allow jurisdictions to plan an effective strategy to bring new investment into an area through harnessing the power of Rolta's spatial integration capabilities.
Rolta's solution for economic development allows a geospatial centric approach to growing investment and jobs in your area by spatially integrating various data sources in your organization and then providing the visualization to analyze:
- Business Retention - helping businesses identify which locations to retain and which to downsize
- Business Site Location - helping businesses select the perfect site, using advanced adaptive search capability
- Infrastructure investment - helping economic development agencies visualize and analyze the best areas to target infrastructure spending and incentives
- Marketing Campaigns - helping your organization target market to specific businesses in specific regions to gain maximum impact
The power of visualization is inherent in the way people think, understand and decide. Rolta understands the vital link between location and economic development. In partnership with your organization, Rolta can bring a whole new perspective to economic development as we leverage our unique spatial and enterprise integration solutions to help economic development executives benefit from the rapid fusion of economic development content through one window, one view.
Advantage - Insight
Crisis and opportunity often work hand-in-hand. The current economic crisis is continuing to influence decision makers to adjust quickly and find new ways to grow their business in an efficient manner. This crisis can be your opportunity if you have the capability to highlight all of the advantages of your location. But this is not easily accomplished when land information, demographics, utility, transportation, education, taxation and other critical information is isolated in inaccessible information systems owned by numerous agencies.
This is where Rolta can help. We have the technology and expertise to first access this data without the costs and delays of custom programming and secondly to provide visibility to this information in a spatial context so that patterns can be seen, opportunities identified and investment decisions made easily without the laborious job of searching for needed information.
Benefit - Impact
Information is power and in this global economy. The speed of assimilating the right information in an insightful way can be a huge catalyst to the next big economic development opportunity.
Management View
Business Objectives
While economic development authorities are increasingly competing for investment dollars and employment, you may find yourself facing the following challenges:
- How do you streamline and simplify work processes to gain efficiency in your operations?
- How do you secure additional funding to implement new technology?
- How do you utilize geography and cutting edge technology to provide added value for your agency?
- How do you provide the tools to help retain existing business and drive new business?
Rolta enables you to run an effective and efficient economic development organization, which uses the power of geospatial technology as a differentiator and a source of spatial intelligence.
Solution
An investor may approach your agency to request assistance in finding appropriate sites. They may decide to do their research on the web and find a few appropriate sites even before calling you. You may need recommendations on where to offer incentives and where to increase infrastructure spending. You may need to find ways to be more competitive, increase efficiency and ROI. In all these steps, geography is a unique element that supports that aggregation of dynamic, not just static data. A picture may be worth a thousand words - a dynamic map to you is worth much more than that.
Rolta can help by providing Rolta's Economic Development Solution which allows investors to visualize demographics, infrastructure and available property in order to select their ideal location in your area. Rolta provides a competitive advantage by providing the "wow" factor to investors with an intuitive and effortless navigation. Our adaptive search capability allows users to discover sites flexibly, based on criteria, without tying your users to a regimented search mechanism. Rolta's solution supports the fusion of both spatial and business content wihtin one spatially enabled web based dashboard to support site discovery, demographic analysis and investment planning.
Approach
Rolta's Strategic Planning Services allow you to plan an effective strategy to harness the power of geography in bringing new investment into your area, making the case for government infrastructure, incentives, jobs and investment.
Business Value
Agencies realize the following benefits with Rolta's Economic Development Solution:
- Rapid, on-line access to location and business information required for potential investors
- Advanced system administration tools that support rapid configuration instead of costly custom integration programming
- Analytical tools that allow information to be mined so that marketing dollars can be used in areas of highest impact, targeting investors in key areas
- Dashboard view of key metrics that provide visibility to monitor performance and make necessary adjustments in strategy and tactics
Technical View
Technical Issues
New Economic Development Solutions always face the integration challenge of data that resides in paper, spreadsheets and databases throughout the organization and outside the organization. There are always different business systems for content management, customer relationship management, mapping and administration. This is made more complex by multiple GIS and IT platforms, managed by multiple departments in an organization and legacy applications that are not user friendly, difficult to maintain and even more difficult to enhance. Likewise, organizations struggle to adopt new technology and leverage its' improved capabilities.
Rolta provides cutting edge technology, which continuously leverages the advances in core technology platforms such as ESRI Microsoft and others. Our solutions are specifically targeted to reduce the complexity and challenge that IT organizations face today.
Solution Components
Rolta's Economic Development Solution includes:
- Adaptive search
- Advanced security
- Simple and easy to manage selection sets
- Thematic rendering
- Integration capability to multiple data sets and business systems
- Ability to pull in spatial information from Google Maps, Bing Maps, Pictometry and ESRI's ArcGIS Server
- Dashboard view of performance against KPI's, mapping and other operational metrics
- Seem-less integration with SharePoint, Oracle's OBIEE and other BI engines, ESRI's Business Analyst and other business systems, integrated map views with the ability to share and discover between the individual elements
Implementation
Economic Development implementations require a coordinated approach and the development of workflows that support the applications. Needs assessment and work process analysis are important elements to determine how the solution needs to be configured to meet organizational objectives. Business metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) are also critical to identify early in the specification process so that dashboards can be created to meet the needs of executive and managers throughout the organization.
Rolta's Economic Development Solution is quick to deploy. You can be up and running within weeks with basic searches and reports. Implementation commences with training on our core OnPoint™ software and specific training for the Economic Development Solution. Training should be taken by those who will be responsible for maintaining and updating the site, likely from the IT or GIS department. This is followed by a needs assessment for the various stakeholders which is the basis for identifying a prioritized list of key reports and searches. Software installation then takes place, carefully coordinating with the IT department to ensure adherence to standards.
How Does it Fit and Why is it Different?
You will find that Rolta provides a very intuitive solution that radically reduces the need for custom programming. Our administration tool provides for rapid product configuration via a point-and-click interface. The technology also provides a very advanced security solution which provides the capabilities to restrict information access to meet departmental requirements.