Spatial resource tools -- Products or pain relievers
Joe Astroth
Vice President, GIS
Autodesk, Inc.
111 McInnis Parkway
San Rafael, California 94903
Introduction
In his book, Crossing the Chasm, technology guru Geoffrey Moore characterizes GIS as having been "in the
bowling alley" in the 1980s. By this, Moore meant that the GIS industry had passed the early adopter stage and
was beginning to be accepted by the mainstream majority of technology users. However, according to Moore the
GIS industry took a step back during the 1990s, and is now "in the chasm" - a kind of no-man's land between
sparking the interest of those who must have the latest tools and the acceptance by pragmatists looking for
proven solutions. Moore maintained that GIS may have created its own barriers to broader acceptance by being
"discontinuous with the current technological infrastructure, requiring] so much customization to be effective,
and demanding] so much data administration. " In short, he says we put ourselves in the chasm, and the
challenge our industry faces now is how to cross the gap. The bridge would result not from developing products,
but in solving real customer pains.
Today the GIS industry is heading in the right direction again. We are moving upstream within organizations to
automate critical business processes rather than remaining at the traditional departmental level. At the heart of
this trend is wider access to geospatial information throughout organizations, which in turn is dependent on two
factors: data integration and ease of use. End-users are demanding an environment where more people can use
easily understood GIS tools to access, analyze and share mission-critical information.
In the past, the industry's emphasis was on products -- developing new technology filled with functionality for
the GIS technician. But our industry has failed to realize its promise as an enterprise-wide decision support tool
following this approach. Customers have rejected the massive toolbox approach, because these types of tools
require too much specialization. Instead, customers want an integrated family of products that provides the right
tool for the right job. Hastening this process is the fact that "smarts" are being distributed across systems, even
databases are getting smarter. Vendors are putting more of the smarts into the software so that people can spend
more of their time focusing on the solution to their business problem. As we move more of the traditional job of
the GIS technician into the software, we're allowing people to spend less time on keystrokes and more time
gleaning insights from the data.
Part of the barrier to the wide acceptance of GIS has been the legacy need for a GIS gatekeeper to act as the
champion and protector of spatial data -- someone to "translate" GIS into the language of the rest of the
organization. This middleman is vanishing as organizations flatten their information-producing and -consuming
structures and broaden access to spatial data as a way to increase their value and optimize a return on the large
investments they have made in data.
The wholesale acceptance of the Internet and World Wide Web are driving a paradigm shift in GIS. Powerful
tools built on these platforms are changing forever the way spatial data are distributed, accessed and
communicated both inside and outside the enterprise. A whole layer of GIS technicians and gatekeepers -- the
GM middlemen - are being released to do different work in organizations, to helping organizations relieve
distinct pains.
Today, spatial data users with few GIS skills - but with a strong faith in the power of spatial data - are solving
customer service problems at telecommunications companies and utilities like PacifiCorp and Telia, calling up
'~ust the right" spatial information at the click of a mouse. Even more powerful solutions are available in other
departments throughout the enterprise. True network-centric GIS, once a visionary's dream, is now reality.
