GIS is Transforming The Enterprise – Again!

Over the years, Geospatial Information Systems (GIS) have become the backbone for many organizations to best make sense of the world and drive effective decision-making.

To broaden that utility, there is a developing movement in which organizations are seeking to expand the reach and the return on investment (ROI) in those systems by adding complementary lightweight location-enabled applications and capabilities for people not trained in GIS: decision-makers, analysts, scientists, engineers, mobile and field personnel – really just about everyone else in the enterprise.

Rather than just deliver a map, recent innovations in the geospatial community enable delivering interactive location-enable applications. By using open geospatial and IT standards and practices, they combine maps, spatial databases, business logic to provide instead a product, which invites exploration and the answering of questions on one’s own.

The movement is about developing and using lightweight applications and capabilities that integrate seamlessly into common workflows, making everyone in the organization a potential customer and beneficiary of the GIS department’s work.

GIS professionals are firm believers in the technologies that they embrace every day, and their return on the considerable investments made in them with jobs, tools, and training bear that faith out.

The foundation of this belief is that they are helping to provide the intelligence and insight that drive fundamental decision-making. Whether for defense and intelligence applications, or helping utility companies better track and manage field assets, spatial information provides true power to any organization.

Until recently, GIS professionals have served the enterprise either by distilling their work into relatively static maps and reports, or with mind-bendingly complex applications and concepts, understood only by people trained in GIS as ancillary skill to their main profession. This cognitive overhead has sometimes led people who aren’t so trained and view the GIS department as something peripheral to the main organization, leaving a relatively small subset of the organization that could actually leverage the considerable work done by the GIS team – clearly a suboptimal arrangement.

GIS systems will always provide value, but they become more valuable when the work can be distilled into simple, but powerful applications that can unlock the power of spatial data and reveal it to those who will drive the organization’s future.

For many GIS professionals, their day-to-day work is producing maps.  If in addition to making a map, they could extend that map to their end user as a GIS-Lite application at the push of a button, what kind of conversations and possibilities for collaboration might that engender? What would the return on GIS investment be if everyone were both client and potential contributor to the GIS be?

This new approach increases the potential audience of this data tremendously.  Also, by providing GIS information to every aspect of the enterprise, it is possible to further enhance collaboration, driving more efficient and effective decision-making and implementation.

Today’s organizations face competitive challenges on local and global scales. In order to meet these challenges, organizations need to work more collaboratively, agilely, and in increasingly innovative cross-disciplinary processes. No organization that has invested in GIS can credibly claim they have maximized their ROI in their GIS if the GIS doesn’t reach and contribute to the productivity of all of the people in the organization that it might. GIS-Lite is one capability that’s required to reach some of those people.

Author:  George Demmy, Chief Technology Officer, TerraGo Technologies