Geography Matters : GIS Day, Business

Jack Dangermond on Enterprise GIS

GeographyMatters — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 19:43:00 GMT

GIS has evolved to meet enterprise-wide needs much like the enterprise software evolutions in the financial, human resources, supply chain, and customer management arenas. An enterprise GIS is an integrated, multi-departmental system for collecting, analyzing, visualizing, managing, and disseminating geographic information. It includes the infrastructure, mission critical capabilities, and robust architectures associated with other enterprise software. It is intended to address both the collective and individual needs of an organization, and to make geographic information and services available to both GIS and non-GIS professionals.

The principal purposes of an enterprise GIS are to provide broad access to geospatial data, a common infrastructure upon which to build and deploy GIS applications, a common GIS data management framework, and significant economies of scale and resulting business value through organization-wide deployment and use.

Characteristics of an enterprise GIS include:

Organization-wide data availability-any authorized user who would benefit from geospatial data has easy access to it
Key to the achievement of mission critical business objectives
Scalable, extensible, reliable, and secure
Capable of being effectively integrated within the enterprise
Supports a wide range of technical and non-technical users through a robust set of GIS tools ranging from lightweight browsers to expert-level analytical, modeling, geodata management, and development programs
Organization-wide standards and governance processes-software, data, and infrastructure standards must be established and governed across the enterprise
Like other enterprise technologies, may be complex to implement-requires significant planning and support
Delivers a high return-on-investment

The manner in which an enterprise GIS is administered and managed depends on the needs, operational maturity, and even the culture of an organization. In some organizations, a centralized group performs the planning, implementation, and support of enterprise GIS data and infrastructure. In others, core data layers and related infrastructure are administered centrally while individual departments maintain the data and infrastructure specifically required to meet their unique requirements. There is no single enterprise GIS model that is right for everyone. The more complex the organization, the more thought needed to determine the optimal architecture, procedures, and governance processes.

Many ESRI users have successfully deployed enterprise GIS in their organizations including federal agencies, state and local governments, utility companies, national mapping organizations, and transportation agencies. Scott Bowman from the City of Fresno, California, and Linda Gerull from Pierce County, Washington, are two GIS managers with experience implementing an enterprise GIS.

Read their thoughts on this topic in an issue of ArcUser that included a special focus section on Managing a GIS.

A Post by Jack Dangermond: More Thoughts on the Benefits of GIS

GeographyMatters — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 21:05:00 GMT

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.

GIS Industry Moving Closer to Society-wide Application

GeographyMatters — Fri, 01 Sep 2006 21:30:00 GMT

There are several important trends occurring in the GIS industry. The first is the growing volume of geospatial data coming from many sources. There is an increase in geographic measurement being driven by new technologies (i.e. satellite and airborne sensing, Lidar, GPS, and digital surveying) as well as by real-time sensors that are capturing data and making it available as Web services.

We also see increases in data being made available from workflows that regularly create and maintain GIS datasets (i.e., cadastral data, road information, etc.).

The use of various technologies, such as address geocoding, gazetteer referencing, and other geo-location matching techniques, is resulting in the georeferencing of nearly all types of information (tabular data, documents, photographs, CAD drawings, etc.).

GPS technology is becoming pervasive and making people increasingly aware of geospatial information. However, we see its greatest power for the GIS community in the areas of tracking assets, people, etc., and collecting professional grade survey measurements. ESRI is supporting this trend by adding more capability to directly integrate and use these various data types in its core product line.

The second trend is a growing interest in GIS services on the Web and in a service-oriented architecture (SOA) environment. The Web services environment offers some new and interesting opportunities for GIS users to provide greater access to their information and collaborate with others by combining (orchestrating) their services to create applications. This capability means that the information being maintained in individual GIS systems will be able to be used to create new applications by sharing data and services.

GIS on the Web tends to be easier to learn and use. As GIS becomes more available in this environment, people who are not familiar with GIS (teachers, professionals from many fields, and even citizens) will increasingly have access to knowledge previously only available to GIS specialists.

A third trend is the increasing geographic literacy of society. This is in part a direct result of the first two trends. Over time, there will be a growing demand for all of the capabilities and knowledge that GIS offers. Citizens, special interest groups, and professionals of all types will apply geography more in their thinking and behavior. In the software area, GIS continues to evolve in its mission and focus. It will continue to be a strong tool for individual productivity and projects, and also continue to expand into enterprise and society-wide applications. GIS servers will provide the framework for this.

While this trend started with software for serving maps and data on the Web, the release of ArcGIS Server 9.2 will dramatically extend this capability by providing the full power of GIS within the enterprise computing environment and on the Web. This environment “serves” the knowledge of GIS professionals in intuitive and ready to use Web clients such as ArcGIS Explorer. In terms of society-wide application of GIS, we are still only at the beginning. In the future, GIS users will build individual systems that serve their users better. This will deliver enormous benefits. Some users are starting to collaborate with other users to build new forms of Web-based systems that integrate information and services from multiple sources.

While some of this thinking is a few years out for many users, ESRI is interested in supporting our users and their work in these areas and will be building technology that is open, interoperable, and supportive of these kinds of collaborations.

GIS and geography are a powerful medium for communication and collaboration

GeographyMatters — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 17:04:00 GMT

The work of GIS users has clearly demonstrated the value of using geographic knowledge and GIS tools for applications in almost every discipline and field. Their efforts, together with the underlying technology, have stimulated a new geography-based approach to problem solving and thinking about our world. Many have characterized GIS as one of the most powerful of all information technologies because it focuses on integrating knowledge from multiple sources and creates a cross-cutting environment for collaboration.

In addition, GIS is attractive to most people who encounter it because it is both intuitive and cognitive. It combines a powerful visualization environment with a strong analytic and modeling framework that is rooted in the science of geography. This combination has resulted in a technology that is science-based, trusted, and easily communicated across cultures, disciplines, social classes, and languages.

Until recently, comparatively few people have had direct access to the capabilities that GIS provides. This is changing as GIS technology fully emerges on the Web. The combination of new GIS server technology and intuitive, easy to use Web clients will open up the domain of GIS to many more participants.

In this context, GIS technology can be thought of as a new medium for communication, not unlike newspapers, radio, television, and the Web. This medium is being used to help people better understand and collaborate as well as formulate and tell stories about conditions, situations, and events, and even forecast the future.

Over time, GIS will become more widely used to create a common understanding of what we as humans collectively know. This will provide many benefits to society and help us manage our future.

The work of authoring and serving geographic knowledge will largely be the domain of GIS professionals. While they will continue to create and apply geographic knowledge themselves, they will also increasingly support systems that allow other professionals in their organizations, as well as society at large, to have access to the power of GIS. This will mean that the influence of GIS will grow and provide a powerful medium for communicating our world.