 Maneesh Prasad Managing Editor & Chief Operating Officer maneesh.prasad@gisdevelopment.net It took us 15000 years to double our global per capita income till the 1750 and thereafter in next 250 years we had our per capita income increasing by 73 times. The growth of individual wealth, the nation's economy has been linked closely with innovation and its commercial exploitation. The global economy would continue to grow in years to come. Hence the money available for spending, particularly for the infrastructure would continue to be available in figures which will be huge compared to the last spending. As a member of geospatial community, we would continue to look forward to our share in this huge spending. Almost similar to looking for, 'needle in the haystack'. The usage of 'Geospatial Tools' in the planning stage of an infrastructure has been accepted by many of the Planners. The relevance of Geospatial as an important tool for engineering and construction work is being understood and accepted, leading to the enterprises calling for the integration of geospatial tools with the organisation information model. Continuous efforts have been made to position the geospatial as the integrating platform for the various elements of the construction and engineering. But, geospatial continues to be looked upon as one of the many isolated information silos as pointed out by Geoff Zeiss in this issue. According to various industry reports, the global spending on construction and engineering for the infrastructure development and maintenance would be upwards US$41 Trillion, between 2005 and 2040. This is nearly US$1.6 Trillion per year. The global construction and engineering industry is nearly US $2.3 Trillion. Seeing the present state of infrastructure in United States, upwards US$ 1.6 Trillion is proposed to be spent on civil works for infrastructure development and renovation in US over next five years. Compared to this, the GIS market size, according to Frost & Sullivan the global market revenues was expected to reach $8.33 billion in 2007. This spending would be in construction and engineering along with those areas like natural resource management, defense and security, business management etc. Even if construction and engineering has 25% of total geospatial spending, it amounts to nearly US$2.1 Billion. The share for the geospatial industry in the global construction spending is less than a quarter percent. It is important for us to work on finding methods which can hasten the speed of geospatial becoming an integral part of an enterprise, by reaching quickly the final stages of Nolan's Growth Model. Maybe this would call for positioning the needle rightly in the haystack. |