GIS From Nothing to Something?
Matt Sheehan
Working at the convergence of Geospatial, AII, spatial computing and blockchain ~ Unlocking geospatial's potential at Versar
If the word GIS in this blog post title caught you attention … you may not be the person I want reading this article!
I’m being rude aren’t I. Let me explain.
GIS From Nothing to Something?
That term from nothing to something. This is the next phase for GIS. As location experts (GIS professionals), we’ve all been swimming in the same rather small pool. Its time to stop being confined. To move into wider and deeper waters. That means introducing GIS technology to a new user base. Moving the wider business community from (GIS) nothing to something is exciting but presents new challenges.
Let’s consider some real business problems:
– We need to better manage our assets
– We need better ways to asses and measure risk.
– We need to start using mobile devices to improve our workflows
– Our marketing department is always looking to better understand our customers.
– Google Maps is great but a little limited for our new commercial properties for sale.
Do any of these problems mention location? Did any of them use the term technology or GIS?
Nope. But these and so many other business problems are geographic in nature. Truly one of our challenges in bringing (GIS powered) solutions to solve these problems is a wide misunderstanding of what is geography.
Regardless, our challenge is to bring organizations from GIS nothing to something. Those who can stay focused on business problems and ‘crack the nut’ that is bringing in GIS to solve (geographic) problems will be wildly successful in the next few years.
Please feel free to like and share this post if you've found it useful.
Contact us for more information on 801-733-0723.
Working at the convergence of Geospatial, AII, spatial computing and blockchain ~ Unlocking geospatial's potential at Versar
9 年Thanks for sharing your thoughts Allen. I could not agree more.
Proven Advanced Technology Innovator | Helping Companies Translate Their Business Goals to Operational Reality
9 年If we want geospatial technology to become mainstream, we have to move beyond our tight little community where everyone walks, talks and thinks geospatially. To the rest of the (uninformed) tech world, GIS is just another tool in the box, but one that should be applied with some skill. That skill includes both knowledge of how to use it, and something of the terminology of usage. To the uninitiated, the world of GIS can be rather formidable, largely because terminology used is highly specific and evolutionary, giving terms to items and names to processes where substantially similar or identical terms already exist in conventional IT usage. I've noticed that more and more business development, sales and technical consulting folks seldom use the term GIS, instead talking about and marketing the merits of geospatial data processing. They are finding better success and less resistance from managers who are tired of hearing about GIS, or perhaps have had a previous negative experience. This is probably part of the maturation of any technology, but those of us who have been around from the start sometimes have a hard time letting go!