In the world of our imagination, all things will work smoothly in our designated time allotment. In the real world the "Laws of Murphy" prevail: where anything that can does and will likely always either go completely wrong or neither way anything was intended or desired to go. Otherwise said, expect the unexpected.
As I have been taking this online GIS Graduate Certificate course with the University of West Florida, I have learned that things go wrong. But as I have begun working as an intern with a local Regional Commission, serving the good of the local government communities, most of our data received from our clients has a bug in it. Now granted all bugs are not big nor all bugs bad, but when humans are involved there will be something wrong nearly all of the time with client originated data. (Most of our clients are local government offices).
Much of our data is received in csv - excel data sheets. Some is sent as a hand drawing or old paper maps which are converted to digital data (even worse).
Our office has recently opened its computer servers as cloud servers for our clients. We publish their data on Arcgis online. One of our clients sent their layers for us to place on a working map for their office to improve their public works efficiency. At the meeting when our representative was demonstrating the services of arcgis online, there were many excited comments about the vast abilities of seeing the "live" data layers. Before the meeting was over one of the workers had altered 4 hydrants and changed the size of 2 major water lines without realizing it. He was following instructions to become familiar with the new software. Thankfully, the inadvertent (accidental) changes were found before the meeting ended. His actions opened immediate procedures for editing procedures. In this situation, not only was the original data bad being more than 7 years old; there was someone actively editing it without any thought to the consequences. So not only was the data old, it got worse.
Lastly, I would say that a break in the communication process is the second petpev out there. This happens more often when a gis task is completed and sent to the client for the client to come back with "oh, that's not what I wanted". When the client really means, "oh the results are not what I expected." Which when interpreted by GIS is more likely that the client's desired intentions came out different than what the client thought they would. Numbers and data visualization have no emotions, but its the spatial results that influence the decisions.
It's amazing to watch truth shine in maps and numbers.
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