Developing Market-oriented Strategies For Shaanxi Provincial Geomatics Centre

Nowadays, the government in Shaanxi Province is developing the"Local Spatial Data Infrastructure (LSDI) within the Framework of Digital Xi'an". the Shaanxi Bureau of Surveying and Mapping (SBSM) has done much basic work for it, including constructing basic spatial database of the whole province on 1:1000000, 1:250000 and 1:50000 and of the part of the province on 1:10000. Under this trend, Shaanxi Provincial Geomatics Centre (SPGC), a public mapping agency belonging to SBSM, has been mandated to change its main mission from the data provider to making data available, and hence had a new responsibility to facilitate the broadest access to and responsible use of the Geo-foundation data at"affordable"prices. What is more, the SPGC's budget from the Central Government has been reduced continuously. Accordingly, it is necessary for the SPGC to adapt to the changes in the market need for competing with private firms in providing data and value-added products to obtain more commercial revenue. Therefore, the SPGC is undergoing a major transformation from a budget-oriented to a market-oriented organization.To arrive at this objective, market-oriented strategies are developed by a SWOT analysis for the SBSM in this research. Firstly, a conceptual framework is constructed, composed of factors for GI market failure & non- market failure, characteristics of a budget-oriented organization and a market-oriented one, and indicators for SWOT. Secondly, by fieldwork, the budget status of SPGC (internal environment) and the local GI market in Xi'an (external environment) have been described. Thirdly, based on the fieldwork data and the indicators for SWOT, strengths and weaknesses of the SPGC and opportunities and threats in the market are ascertained. Then, market-oriented strategies are developed, in light of a SWOT analysis and the factors for GI market failure and GI non-market failure. After that, the effects of the proposed strategies are evaluated by the qualitative criteria of customer satisfaction, timeliness and responding to change. In the end, one strategy,"develop a market-oriented production workflow"is selected for modelling and testing by Unified Modelling Language and Tecnomatix Plan Simulation software.The evaluation results illustrate that these strategies can contribute to gaining customer trust, delivering products in time and flexible responding to changes. The simulation results on testing an alternative production workflow suggest production time and cost can be decreased. It is recommended that more alternatives should be tested because predictions on different alternatives are required to find out the best one for putting it into practice.