Staff Spotlight: Bill Dollins, Chief Information Officer/Geographic Information Officer
By: Sam Puckett
Tags: Leadership, Running, GIS, Geospatial, Cio

You often hear us talk about Spatial Networks being a great place to work. That is largely due to the caliber of the folks at the top.

Effective leaders not only encourage and enable employees to do their best work at the office — but to stretch themselves personally, as well.

Bill Dollins is one of those leaders. Not only is he ridiculously competent, but he’s funny, smart, and kind. And in recent months, he has taken on a personal challenge that many of us have been inspired to emulate. (If you follow Bill on Twitter, you’re already familiar with his success in the “war on cubicle body.”)

So without further ado, meet Bill:

Tell us a bit about your background.

I am a lifelong resident of Southern Maryland (that’s the part with the good crabs), aside from a few years in Baltimore for college and a year in Annapolis around the time my wife and I got married. In fact, we sold the house I grew up in when we moved to our current location. I went to the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC).

I worked my way through college in restaurants and did just about every job one could do in them, including managing a few. It was the kind of work that definitely kept me motivated to finish college and do something — anything — else. I met my wife in one of the restaurants where we both worked. We have been married for 24 years this year and have two children. Our son is 22 and our daughter is 16. My wife was a history education major who now teaches 7th grade English and she’s the smartest person I know.

After college, I spent most of my career prior to Spatial Networks working as a federal contractor. In that capacity, I spent 15 years as a partner in a small technical services company. During 24 years in federal contracting, I worked with all of the military services, a few combatant commands, DHS, the Department of Energy, and a few smaller agencies.

Bill and his wife, Muriel, at Acadia National Park.

How did you get into this industry?

I wrote my first code when I was 10 years old and was hooked. I stuck with it through high school and college in the 1980s. From childhood, I also had a love of maps, but I never really knew the two things could go together. We had a neighbor who had every issue of National Geographic, bound by year, and I would spend hours going through the maps.

After college, I was working as a bartender and one of my regulars mentioned he was hiring for a contract they had just gotten digitizing maps of Army bases. I applied and was hired. That’s when I learned GIS existed and have stuck with it ever since. Because I knew how to program, I began automating a lot of our processes. I pretty much coded daily for the next 20+ years.

What does your job entail?

As CIO, I am primarily concerned with managing the availability and security of corporate systems and information. That’s everything from accounting and HR to CRM, email, and file storage, as well and the information they contain. It also involves securing company-owned devices, such as laptops, phones, and tablets and well as our own cloud-based assets. I’m able to rely on a really good team of technical experts to set things up and monitor them, which leaves me to focus primarily on policy and compliance.

As GIO, I am responsible for leading the development of the “plumbing” that keeps our geospatial data current, relevant, and available for our analyst teams. This is primarily relevant to our Foresight product line. That involves conditioning data in various ways, using tools like PostGIS, Fulcrum Desktop, and FME. We wrote about that process a couple of months ago on the Spatial Networks blog. It also involves getting our data searchable and ready for delivery, which is an ongoing process.

The two roles are actually very inter-related since our geospatial data is one of our most valuable internal data assets, so the security aspects of my role as CIO are directly relevant to my role as GIO.

What gets you out of bed in the morning?

My alarm, at 0430.

Seriously, though, what gets me out of bed is the opportunity to work with an outstanding team and have a positive impact on our users by helping our products get better. I know that sounds corny, but, after two decades of federal contracting, it’s exciting to see the speed with which a feature goes from concept to delivery to customer feedback. The time-to-market with both Fulcrum and Foresight means you can see the direct relationship between a product enhancement and its concrete benefit to our users.

Even though I don’t write as much code as I used to, I have reconnected with the excitement I felt when I was a kid learning how to program. I feel pretty lucky to be able to say that at this stage of my career.

What’s the most rewarding (or challenging) part of your job?

At this point in my career, my role skews more heavily toward leadership over technical tasks, so the most rewarding part of my job is supporting the professional development of our staff. Since I come from a programming background, I can clearly remember the thrill of mastering a new language or technique, or the rush when I solved a particularly complex problem and saw my code working the way I wanted it to.

I get the same kind of thrill now from giving our staff the tools they need to succeed and putting them in positions to solve hard problems and feel that sense of accomplishment. If I can know that I helped someone get better, then I have had a successful day.

The most challenging part of my job is the security aspect. We, like a lot of companies, make use of a number of cloud-based hosted systems for various business functions. Even ten years ago, most of these systems would have typically been running on hardware resident on premises. In that situation, you had total control over how they were deployed and secured, but you also shouldered a lot more overhead.

With hosted systems, it’s become more about managing trust relationships with hosting providers. Even when a product itself is open-source, the hosted install is still a black box. Because vendors can achieve better economies of scale, the overall cost for us is much less than managing a bunch of local installs, but we’re placing a lot more trust in the vendors to secure our data. The bigger upside is that new features are deployed faster, so we see improvements more rapidly, but the security landscape is definitely more complex.

Of course, Fulcrum is also a hosted system and our customers put a lot of trust in us, so I believe firmly in the business model. Seeing how seriously our own team takes the security of our customer data heartens me as I interact with our hosting vendors.

What’s something you’re excited about right now?

At Spatial Networks, I am excited about the continued maturation of our Foresight product. While the line of business is not new for us, there’s been a lot of focus over the past year and a half to streamline the production and delivery of data products. This includes attention to improving how we interact with data collection personnel around the world. I think the next six to eight months are going to be exciting.

In the industry as a whole, I’m excited about the volumes of data that are being generated now from various sources. At the start of my career, I did some work in the modeling and simulation field. That work was all predicated on the idea of extrapolating conclusions from small sets of representative data. The current environment turns that approach on its head in that we can analyze for patterns and correlations using rich sets of real-world data. It reduces the need for assumptions and equivalences and can lead to more accurate analytical outcomes.

The Dollins family.

What do you do outside of work?

I love to spend time with my family, It can be almost anything, even a trip to the grocery store. But we enjoy going to the movies and venturing around the local area, such as up to DC.

Over the past 14 months or so, I have taken up running and have grown to really enjoy it. It started because I was simply not in the shape I wanted to be. Although running was far from my favorite activity, it was the most efficient way for me to get in shape and stay there. Now, my long runs are a meditative experience. I run without headphones and I have my phone completely silenced. As a result, running is one of the few times when I am free of artificial inputs and I can simply settle into the rhythm of my feet on the ground.

I enjoy both reading and writing, especially the latter. I don’t get to do either one nearly as much as I’d like, but I have a goal to change that. Running has taught me the discipline of time management and I plan to explore other ways to use that skill.

I also enjoy fishing and would love to learn how to fly fish. Catching is fun, but optional. The peacefulness of sitting in a swaying boat and watching a line in the water is a reward in itself.

What would people be surprised to learn about you?

I’m currently training to run the Marine Corps Marathon in October. I wasn’t convinced until a couple of months ago that I would even attempt a marathon, but I decided I have to try at least one.

A photo of a photo taken by my daughter of me running the Army Ten Miler, with the Pentagon in the background.

What’s your favorite place in the world, and why?

We’re pretty deeply rooted where we live and the experiences we’ve had here definitely make home my favorite place.

But, if I had to pick someplace other than home, I would choose Annapolis, Maryland, for entirely personal reasons. My wife and I had our first dates there; we got married there; we lived there for a while; our son was born there. I had the opportunity to run a half marathon in Annapolis last year. It was Veterans’ Day weekend and the start line was at Navy-Marine Corps Memorial Stadium, which would have been moving in itself. As the race started, I ran through the historic downtown and I was flooded with nostalgia. I am feeling overcome even as I write this.

As a historic, colonial city, Annapolis is awash with history and it’s the antithesis of the sterile, planned communities we build today. It’s a little grimy in some spots, a little ill-fitting in others, and, despite its laid-back nautical vibe, it gives its approval begrudgingly. How could I not love it?

Bill after completing the Annapolis Running Classic half marathon.

Interested in joining Bill and the rest of the Spatial Networks team? Check out our available openings here.