Small utilities, water districts, engineering firms, and conservation organizations have real spatial data and no GIS department. I help teams find out what they actually have, collect it better, build the maps and applications they need, see what years of records are telling them, and cut the licensing and server costs that never matched the size of the organization.
Behind that is fifteen years of information management more broadly: data, records, SharePoint, and running the programs that tie them together.
Organizations with real spatial data and no GIS department. If one person "does the maps" on top of their actual job, and everyone quietly worries what happens when they leave, that's the situation I work in. The same goes for documents and records: if the shared drive is the filing system, I work there too.
You have assets in the ground, aging as-builts, and a licensing bill that keeps climbing. You need to know where things are without paying for a platform built for a city of a million.
Easements, parcels, monitoring records, and grant reporting deadlines. The data exists, but it's spread across drives, inboxes, and one very important laptop.
You inherited a legacy GIS deployment that costs more to maintain than it returns, and nobody on staff wants to own the server.
Records that go back decades, a modernization mandate, and no budget for a full-time specialist to sort it out.
It starts with knowing what you have. From there: collect it better, put it to work, cut what you don't need, and make it last. Most organizations need two or three of these, and engagements usually start small and only continue if the first piece proves useful.
Before anything gets rebuilt, someone has to inventory the mess. I go through your drives, databases, and systems and produce a plain-language picture of what exists, what's duplicated, what's wrong, and what you're at risk of losing.
Most small organizations are paying someone to re-type field notes into a spreadsheet. I stand up an ArcGIS Online organization and build the collection tools around it, so your crews capture what they see on a phone or tablet and it lands in one place, already correct. I've built field collection systems for Washington State fisheries research and worked field seasons myself, so the forms are designed by someone who has filled them out in the rain.
When the off-the-shelf template doesn't fit, I build the thing you actually need. I'm a developer as well as a GIS analyst, so the option isn't limited to what a configuration wizard will allow, whether that's inside the Esri ecosystem or a standalone web app with no licensing attached to it at all.
Organizations accumulate decades of records and rarely get to ask them anything. I go through what you have and find the patterns: where failures cluster, what's changed over time, which assets are trending the wrong direction, what the data supports when you're writing a grant application or making a case to a board.
A full ArcGIS Enterprise deployment is a lot of license and a lot of server for an organization of fifteen people. In many cases the same work runs on ArcGIS Online plus open-source tooling for a fraction of the cost and a fraction of the maintenance. I've managed ArcGIS Enterprise at multiple organizations, so I know what it's worth when an organization needs it and what it costs when one doesn't. I assess honestly whether that's true for you, including when it isn't, and run the migration if it is.
The most common failure I see isn't a bad system. It's a good one that only one person understood. Whatever we build, I document it so the next person can pick it up without calling me.
GIS is the most recent part of my career, not all of it. For the decade before, I managed data, records, document systems, and compliance programs in the Air Force, at a public utility, and in state government. The same approach applies: find out what you have, organize it, and make it last. If your problem isn't a map, I can still help.
Shared drives that grew for fifteen years without a plan, a SharePoint site nobody can find anything in, or boxes of paper that should have been digital a decade ago. I design the structure, move the content, and set the rules that keep it from sliding back.
Small organizations often have the budget for a modernization project but nobody with the time to run it. I can lead the effort: scoping, coordinating departments and vendors, keeping it on schedule, and making sure it actually lands with the people who have to use it.
Fifteen years across the Air Force, state agencies, municipal government, and public utilities. I do GIS full-time at a public utility now, and I take on a small number of side engagements where I can be genuinely useful. Here's an honest picture of the relevant work.
Utility GIS, ArcGIS Enterprise administration, and custom application development for a public power and water utility. It's the same work described above, at the scale of an organization that serves a county.
Before this, national-scale data governance for emergency response agencies at Intterra, and municipal GIS for the City of Wenatchee.
Audited a city's GIS infrastructure and modernized 23 mission-critical applications, then designed and launched a public open data portal. Led collaboration across 11 departments and 2 counties to unify data-sharing standards.
Rationalized decade-old schemas across 50+ agencies covering 450 datasets and 1.8M records, cutting storage 30%.
B.S. in Natural Resources from Oregon State. For Washington State fisheries research, I built an integrated field data collection system that processed 49,000+ data points from 6,000 subjects.
I've also worked the field side: spawning salmon and carcass surveys, fish surveys for salmon management research, habitat restoration, and invasive species work. For a conservation organization, that means you won't have to explain your data to me.
PlumeFront is a live wildfire, smoke, and air quality map pulling active incidents, perimeters, satellite smoke plumes, and AQI from NIFC, NOAA, and EPA AirNow, with an automated hourly wind-data pipeline. Entirely static and keyless, so it costs nothing to run.
Raven's Roles is a natural resources job board with automated scraping and spatial search. US County Housing Affordability is an interactive web map built on Census and Redfin data.
M.S. in Geospatial Information Science with a remote sensing minor. Master's thesis on utility vegetation management and wildfire risk, directly relevant if you're a utility weighing where to spend a vegetation budget.
LiDAR-based habitat suitability assessment for an endangered sage grouse population, and spatial analysis of wildlife response to road infrastructure.
I'm currently migrating an engineering firm off a legacy ArcGIS Enterprise deployment to a model built on ArcGIS Online and open-source tooling, cutting the licensing and server-maintenance burden that came with the old stack.
This work is underway rather than finished, so I'm not going to quote you a savings figure I haven't verified yet. If it's relevant to what you're weighing, ask me where it stands and I'll tell you straight.
U.S. Air Force, 2011–2017. Supervised enterprise systems and compliance, ranking #1 of 3,000+. Led an audit that recovered $65M+ in government property and brought 180,000 records to 100% compliance in under three months. Eliminated a 75-year records backlog, built enterprise SharePoint systems, and trained hundreds of personnel.
Chelan County PUD. Moved 220,000+ HR and safety records into a compliant digital repository, taking retrieval from days to seconds. Set SharePoint governance across 36 sites and 31,000 documents, and managed division budgets, contracts, and service-level agreements.
I'd rather start small and earn the bigger piece of work than sell you a project neither of us is sure about.
Tell me what's breaking. If I'm not the right fit, or if what you need is an afternoon of work rather than a project, I'll say so and point you somewhere useful.
Most engagements start with a single defined deliverable at a defined price: an audit, a working collection setup, one application, one analysis, one SharePoint cleanup. You own it whether or not you hire me for anything further.
That first piece usually makes the next one obvious. We scope it separately, in priority order, so you can stop at any point with the work still standing on its own.
Every engagement ends with your team able to run what we built. I'm available afterward, but the goal is that you don't need me.
Tell me what your data situation looks like and what's prompting the question. I'll tell you whether I can help and roughly what it would take. No pitch deck.