GIS Governance Coordinator (Hybrid; Richmond, VA)

Key Responsibilities

• Maintain and continuously improve documentation related to enterprise GIS governance standards and practices.
• Facilitate cross-department coordination to ensure consistent adoption of governance policies and procedures.
• Prepare reports, presentations, and briefings for leadership and governance committees.
• Support enterprise GIS strategic planning and continuous improvement activities.
• Develop and execute a work plan to create an enterprise-wide inventory of GIS technologies, applications, processes, and datasets.
• Establish ongoing processes and standards to maintain and update these inventories over time.
• Cook up with business units, IT, and GIS stakeholders to ensure comprehensive coverage and accuracy.
• Analyze inventory findings to identify gaps, overlaps, and opportunities for optimization.
• Lead analysis of existing GIS-related roles, competencies, and responsibilities across the organization.
• Identify core role types and develop standardized GIS role definitions and skill frameworks.
• Assess training, upskilling, and professional development needs required to build and sustain workforce capability.
• Collaborate with HR, training teams, and supervisors to align recommendations with workforce development plans.
• Scope, design, and manage pilot projects to model and implement full lifecycle data governance for key GIS datasets.
• Define governance processes including stakeholder engagement, data stewardship, and data product requirements.
• Evaluate existing workflows and identify improvements for acquisition, maintenance, publication, and archiving of spatial data.
• Document pilot outcomes and create a scalable governance framework applicable to future datasets across the enterprise.
• Lead research and evaluation of methodologies for spatial data analysis in support of enterprise planning and operations.
• Assess available datasets, monitoring systems, modeling tools, and historical records to develop data-driven recommendations.
• Develop recommendations for standardized data sources, processing methods, and analysis approaches.
• Work collaboratively with subject matter experts and cross-functional partners to deliver analytical findings.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Geographic Information Systems, Computer Science, Information Management, or a related field (or equivalent experience).
• 3+ years of hands-on experience in GIS, enterprise spatial data management, or a related discipline.
• Strong knowledge of GIS principles, data management, and enterprise GIS environments.
• Understanding of data governance concepts including stewardship, lifecycle management, metadata, and data quality.
• Demonstrated ability to manage complex projects, engage diverse stakeholders, and coordinate cross-functional teams.
• Strong analytical thinking, workflow documentation, and process design skills.
• Outstanding communication skills—able to write governance documents and present technical findings clearly to non-technical audiences.
• Experience with GIS technologies such as Esri tools (ArcGIS Pro, ArcGIS Enterprise), enterprise geodatabases, and spatial data services.
• Proven ability to work independently, manage competing priorities, and drive initiatives through to completion.