I’ve spent nearly 30 years in the surveying profession, including the last 17 focused on reality capture. When I first started working with LiDAR in 2009, one of the realizations I had that captured its potential was simple:
‘LiDAR is answers waiting for questions.’
That idea struck me because it changed the way I thought about the potential of survey data. The project might end, but the data's value does not.
Yet, despite that potential, surveying and reality capture businesses have maintained the transactional business model: capture the data, produce the deliverable, complete the project, and move on.
But what happens to the data?
Too often, the most valuable information an organization creates ends up buried on a server, external drive, or cloud bucket. I’ve seen this repeat over and over again. The team who collected it knows it exists somewhere. The client may vaguely remember it exists. But six months or three years later, can anyone easily find it, understand it, access it, and put it back to work?
That is the opportunity I believe our industry is missing.
From Project Deliverable to Data Asset
How to manage survey data as a long-term asset?
LiDAR, imagery, control, CAD files, GIS information, and other survey data have value well beyond the transaction that originally paid for their collection.
The first step toward capturing that value is better data management, or 'governance'. And this doesn’t have to be complicated. It starts with some basic discipline around where data lives, how projects are organized, what formats we maintain, what information is connected to the data, and what its quality is.
But it also means answering some fundamental questions:
- Who has access to the data?
- How do they discover that it exists?
- How do we avoid creating uncontrolled copies?
- How do production teams stay synchronized?
- How do we maintain quality, security, and availability over the data's life?
- Most importantly, how do we make that data useful again?
When we can answer those questions, a survey archive starts becoming something very different: a data asset.
Making Your Data Discoverable Changes the Relationship
A simple recurring pattern shows up in all of this, and it's especially important for survey firms to consider. We finish the project and deliver the work, and the relationship often goes quiet until the client needs another survey.
But what if the data itself helped keep that collaboration active?
Imagine your client having a secure, branded way to access and discover the data you’ve already collected for them. They can see where coverage exists. They can identify datasets that may support another project. They can request additional deliverables. And people within their organization who may never have interacted with the original survey team can discover information that already exists.
Now suddenly, you aren’t simply the department (or company) that performed a survey two years ago. You’re the department helping that client continue to get value from its geospatial information.
That changes the relationship.
It elevates the surveyor from a transactional service provider to a long-term data partner and creates opportunities for additional services and deliverables based on work you’ve already performed. You become a partner whose value extends to the organizations your customers work with: construction firms, architects, municipalities, etc.
The potential is real.
Data Governance Shouldn’t Mean Giving Up Your Data
How do you manage survey data without losing control of your files or overpaying for storage? This is where TopoDOT Solutions has taken a deliberate approach with TopoShare.
TopoShare is a data governance platform purpose-built for survey data, but it doesn’t require you to hand over your data. Your organization hosts and manages its datasets in your own environment.
TopoShare connects that environment to the people and workflows that need it, providing the structure to organize projects, manage users and permissions, discover datasets, and securely extend access to internal or external stakeholders.
You retain control of your most valuable asset: your data.
It also means the economics aren’t tied to how many terabytes of LiDAR you’ve accumulated. TopoShare Enterprise uses a flat annual platform license rather than increasing the software price as the amount of data you govern grows. Unlimited projects, unlimited users.
And your LiDAR data doesn’t have to constantly move back and forth through another hosted environment just so someone can view it. TopoShare works with and displays the files where they already live, keeping unnecessary data movement - and the associated cloud storage activity - to a minimum.
The goal isn’t to create another expensive copy of your data. The goal is to make it easier to discover the data you already own, communicate its availability and potential, and collaborate around it to create new opportunities.
That’s really what TopoShare is all about: discover, communicate, collaborate.
From Better Organization to Better Collaboration
How does proper data governance create an operational advantage?
A properly governed data environment connects the people collecting data with those producing deliverables from it and, ultimately, the people who need to use it for decision-making. Everyone knows where the data lives, who can access it, and how to find it.
That sounds simple, but think about how much time organizations spend today searching through old project folders, moving huge datasets around, creating duplicate copies, or even recollecting information because nobody knew it already existed.
And when that information needs to move between acquisition, production, management, a client, or another stakeholder, everyone should be working from a common data environment rather than creating another disconnected copy on someone else's platform.
Solid, self-administered data governance is an operational advantage.
Surveyors Have Already Done the Hard Part
In a nutshell, here’s the part I think survey organizations lose sight of...
You’ve already invested heavily: you've bought the hardware, collected and processed the data, and dedicated the people and expertise needed to understand it. Don’t let all that valuable effort go to waste by hiding it in a project folder after the job is done.
Capture it once. Govern it. Keep it discoverable. And continue creating opportunities from it.
I believe ‘LiDAR is answers waiting for questions’ was right all along. We just need to stop putting the answers where nobody can find them.
If your organization is wrestling with how to centralize survey data, establish governance standards, improve collaboration, or make existing datasets more accessible to your organization and your clients, I’d be happy to compare notes. Connect with me here on LinkedIn and let’s have a conversation.
You can also learn more about TopoShare and our approach to survey data governance on the TopoShare web page.
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