Assessing the business needs and readiness of Palestinian municipalities to adapt GIS to promote public services

Abstract

This paper uses a case study approach to explore the extent to which the municipalities in Palestinian cities are ready to adopt GIS in their business procedures to improve service delivery and planning activities. For this purpose the business needs and data requirements of Bidya municipality which represent Palestine case were researched by adapting Tomlinson’s approach for planning GIS. The research provide a list of Information Products (IPs) which are cases of how GIS will benefit the municipality and support the various work processes, whereas these (IPs) were used to extract a Master Input Data List (MIDL) and a database schema which reflect the actual and comprehensive data requirements to operate the needed GIS. The research concluded that in general most Palestinian municipalities do have other priorities which are considered prerequisites for adopting the GIS and getting the maximum benefits out of it, such as; land registration, addressing system and activating the property tax collection system.