Last month I wrote about educating upper management about the value and benefits of GIS. Now I would like to discuss these benefits in more detail.

Organizations of all sizes and users in almost every industry get value from GIS. They are increasingly interested in and aware of the economic and strategic value of GIS, in part because of the more standards-based technology, as well as the greater awareness of the benefits demonstrated by GIS users.

GIS enterprise solutions and IT strategies that include GIS are growing rapidly. The benefits of GIS generally fall into five general categories:

1.  Greater efficiency resulting in cost savings. These are associated either with carrying out the mission—labor savings from automating or improving a workflow—or improvements in the mission itself. An example for both of these is Sears, which implemented GIS in its logistics operations and has seen dramatic improvements. Sears reduced the time it takes for dispatchers to create routes for their home delivery trucks by about 75 percent. It also reduced the costs of carrying out the mission, reducing drive time by 12-15 percent by selecting routes using GIS. Sears also improved customer service, increased efficiency with respect to return visits to the same site, and provided more efficient scheduling of customers.

2.  Better decision making. This typically has to do with making better decisions about location. Common examples include real estate site selection, route/corridor selection, zoning, planning, conservation, natural resource extraction, etc. Making the correct decision about a location is increasingly seen as strategic to the success of an organization.

3.  Improved communication. Maps and visualizations created using GIS greatly assist in understanding situations and story telling. They are a new language that improves communication between different teams, departments, disciplines, professional fields, organizations, and the public.

4.  Better geographic information recordkeeping. Many organizations have a primary responsibility of maintaining authoritative records about the status and change of geography. Cultural geography examples are zoning, population census, land ownership, and administrative boundaries. Physical geography examples include forest inventories, scientific inventories, environmental measurements, water flows, and a whole host of geographic accountings.

GIS provides a strong system framework for managing these types of systems with full transaction support and reporting tools. These systems are conceptually similar to other information systems in that they deal with data management and transactions, as well as standardized reporting of changing information. However, they are fundamentally different because of the unique data models and hundreds of specialized tools used in supporting GIS applications and workflows.

5.  Managing geographically. In government and many large corporations, GIS is becoming essential to understand what is going on. GIS information products are now being used to communicate among senior administrators and executives at the highest levels of government. They are providing a visual framework for conceptualizing, understanding, and prescribing action. Examples of this include conducting briefings about various geographic patterns and relationships including land use, crime, the environment, and defense/security situations.

GISs are increasingly being implemented as enterprise information systems. This goes far beyond simply spatial enabling of business tables in a DBMS. Geography is emerging as a new way to organize and manage organizations. Just like enterprise-wide financial systems transformed the way organizations were managed in the late twentieth century, similarly, GIS is transforming the way that organizations manage their assets, serve their customers/citizens, make decisions, and communicate.

Examples in the private sector include most utilities, forestry and oil companies, and most commercial/retail businesses. Their assets and resources are now being maintained as an enterprise information system, not only to support the day-to-day work management tasks, but also to provide a broader context for assets and resource management.

Specific examples of ESRI users gaining real benefits from GIS can be found at www.esri.com/casestudies.