"},{"ID":446042,"user_firstname":"Julia","user_lastname":"Colbert","nickname":"Julia Colbert","user_nicename":"jcolbertesri-com_esriinc-2","display_name":"Julia Colbert","user_email":"jcolbert@esri.com","user_url":"","user_registered":"2026-03-19 17:24:57","user_description":"Julia is a Product Marketing Manager at Esri. She works on ArcGIS Enterprise and the Operational Intelligence team.","user_avatar":"
"},{"ID":371832,"user_firstname":"Megan","user_lastname":"Arreola","nickname":"Megan Arreola","user_nicename":"marreola","display_name":"Megan Arreola","user_email":"marreola@esri.com","user_url":"","user_registered":"2025-05-20 23:16:55","user_description":"Megan Arreola is the Product Marketing Manager for Map Viewer. With a Bachelor's in Marketing and experience spanning marketing, management, and customer service, she enjoys creating content and targeted messaging. Outside of work she enjoys exploring the outdoors, traveling to new places, and loves diving into a good book.","user_avatar":"
"},{"ID":8122,"user_firstname":"Katelyn","user_lastname":"Thompson","nickname":"Katelyn Thompson","user_nicename":"kthompson","display_name":"Katie Thompson","user_email":"KThompson@esri.com","user_url":"","user_registered":"2018-06-26 17:47:19","user_description":"Katie Thompson is a Product Marketing Manager at Esri working on Scene Viewer and XR Viewer. She focuses on 3D and immersive experiences and the storytelling that connects people to what the technology can do.","user_avatar":"
"},{"ID":403800,"user_firstname":"Jennifer","user_lastname":"Guzman","nickname":"Jennifer Guzman","user_nicename":"jguzman","display_name":"Jennifer Guzman","user_email":"jguzman@esri.com","user_url":"","user_registered":"2025-09-16 17:43:59","user_description":"Jennifer is a Product Marketing Manager at Esri for ArcGIS Enterprise.","user_avatar":"
"}],"short_description":"Learn how ArcGIS system patterns balance self-service innovation with secure, scalable, and reliable enterprise operations.","flexible_content":[{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"Organizations have more data at their disposal than ever before. Yet data alone does not create understanding or drive action. Location provides the context that connects information to the places, communities, assets, and operations it represents. As demand for location intelligence grows, organizations face a fundamental challenge: How can they make geographic information more accessible without compromising trust, security, or operational reliability? <\/b>An overly centralized approach can limit adoption and turn GIS and IT teams into bottlenecks. Meanwhile, an entirely decentralized approach can lead to duplicated efforts, inconsistent information, and unmanaged risk. To balance both realities, organizations need an operating model that supports both innovation and control.<\/p>\n
The ArcGIS Well-Architected Framework<\/span><\/a> helps organizations strike this balance through complementary system patterns. For example, the self-service mapping, analysis, and sharing system pattern<\/span><\/a> enables people across an organization to discover data, create maps, conduct analysis, and communicate findings. The Enterprise Application Hosting and Management system pattern<\/span><\/a> provides the operational rigor needed to deliver trusted applications to broad audiences and support critical business functions. While these patterns address different organizational needs, both depend on a common foundation for sharing, managing, and using geographic information at scale. For example, a business analyst might use self-service capabilities to create a map showing customer demand to identify underserved areas and share findings with colleagues.<\/p>\n Once the concept demonstrates value at scale, it may evolve into a customer-facing site selection application or an executive dashboard that supports ongoing decision-making. Self-service capabilities help ideas emerge and mature, while enterprise application hosting practices help ensure successful solutions remain scalable and available. Together, these patterns create a path from exploration to enterprise adoption, allowing organizations to move from promising ideas to trusted business capabilities.\u00a0<\/b><\/b><\/p>\n The foundation which enables geographic information to be discovered, analyzed, reused, and shared across business functions is web GIS. It\u2019s an architectural foundation that provides a consistent environment that connects people, applications, workflows, and authoritative geographic information across an organization.<\/p>\n Organizations can establish this foundation with ArcGIS Online, ArcGIS Enterprise, or a combination of both, aligning the implementation with their IT strategy, security requirements, governance model, and operational priorities. This common foundation matters because enterprise value rarely comes from a single map or application. Value grows when trusted information can support many experiences without requiring each team to recreate the underlying data, services, and business logic.<\/p>\n Map Viewer and Scene Viewer, web applications which are included in ArcGIS Enterprise and ArcGIS Online, provide accessible ways to bring this foundation to life. With Map Viewer, people can use their organizational data and Esri provided data to create interactive 2D maps, explore spatial relationships, and use analysis to identify patterns. Scene Viewer extends geographic understanding into 3D when height, scale, visibility, elevation, or the relationship between features and objects and their surroundings provides important context.<\/p>\n Because maps and scenes are part of the same web GIS, they can be reused across multiple experiences and across multiple ArcGIS systems. The same authoritative information can support exploratory analysis, operational dashboards, executive communication, field workflows, public information, and focused business applications. The goal is not to use every capability in every situation. It is to provide the right geographic experience for each business question and desired outcome while maintaining consistency in the information on which those experiences depend. With a shared foundation in place, organizations can expand access to location intelligence beyond GIS and IT teams while maintaining appropriate governance.<\/p>\n The self-service mapping, analysis, and sharing system pattern enables this approach by empowering users with direct access to geospatial information and capabilities. Instead of depending on GIS or IT specialists for every need, people can explore questions and communicate their findings independently. Effective self-service begins with a trusted foundation of authoritative geographic and business information, along with role-based access that gives users the resources they need while maintaining appropriate data governance and control.<\/p>\n Organizations can bring together data from GIS, business systems, field operations, and curated external sources, then make that information easier to discover and reuse while maintaining appropriate controls for access, security, and stewardship. For example, a marketing team might create maps to understand customer demographics and market opportunities, while an operations team could analyze service coverage or asset performance in a specific region. By providing access to trusted information and analytical tools, organizations enable business users to answer many location-based questions independently while maintaining appropriate governance.<\/p>\n This combination of access and governance changes how an organization uses its specialized resources. Business teams can answer routine location-based questions more independently and respond more quickly to changing needs. GIS professionals can focus on advanced analysis, authoritative data management, enterprise architecture, and other strategic priorities instead of serving as the intermediary for every map or data request.<\/p>\n Self-service systems also allow useful ideas to emerge closer from the people who understand the problem. A map created to investigate a local business question may later inform an operational workflow, executive briefing, field activity, or focused application. Not every experiment will become an enterprise solution. Rather, the value of a self-service system is that it gives people a governed<\/span><\/a> environment in which to explore possibilities, test ideas, and determine where location intelligence can improve a decision or workflow. Some of these efforts remain focused on a specific team or business need. Others prove valuable enough to support broader audiences, more critical workflows, or higher operational expectations.<\/p>\n As a solution’s audience and business impact grow, its operational requirements change as well. For example:<\/p>\n As the audience and business impact expand, the consequences of inaccurate information, slow performance, unmanaged change, or unavailable service become more significant. The solution may require stronger controls, clearer ownership, and a deliberate approach to its lifecycle.<\/p>\n The enterprise application hosting and management system pattern<\/span><\/a> addresses this need. It supports the delivery of high-performing, reliable, and secure web and mobile applications to employees, partners, customers, and the public. These applications are designed around defined audiences and workflows and managed according to enterprise expectations for security, reliability, performance, scalability, accessibility, and availability. For example, an insurance organization might develop a dashboard that helps teams monitor claims activity, response times, and customer service performance across regions. As the solution is adopted by additional departments, it may become a trusted operational application used to support daily decision-making across the organization. Enterprise application hosting practices help ensure these business-critical applications remain secure, scalable, and available as their audience and impact grow. Enterprise application delivery is more than embedding a map in an application or sharing it with a larger audience. It encompasses the architecture, governance, change management, automation, and operational practices required to provide a dependable business capability.<\/p>\n Innovation and governance are not competing priorities. Organizations achieve the greatest value from location intelligence when they enable people to explore data, create maps and applications, and solve problems independently while maintaining the governance needed to ensure trusted information, secure systems, and reliable operations. Web GIS provides the shared foundation that connects people, data, maps, applications, and workflows, while governance, ownership, and operational visibility help organizations scale successful solutions beyond individual teams.<\/p>\n To learn how to balance self-service innovation with enterprise readiness, explore the self-service mapping, analysis, and sharing system pattern<\/span><\/a> and the enterprise application hosting and management system pattern<\/span><\/a> in the ArcGIS Architecture Center<\/span><\/a>. Together, these patterns provide practical guidance for enabling broader participation while ensuring that the solutions people create can evolve into trusted enterprise capabilities.<\/p>\n"}],"related_articles":"","show_article_image":false,"card_image":false,"wide_image":false},"yoast_head":"\nWeb GIS: Connecting people, data, and workflows\u00a0<\/b><\/b><\/h3>\n
Self-Service Pattern: Expanding participation and reducing bottlenecks\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/b><\/b><\/h3>\n
Enterprise Application Hosting: Operationalizing high-value solutions\u00a0<\/b><\/b><\/h3>\n
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Designing intentionally for innovation and governance\u00a0<\/b><\/b><\/h3>\n