Spatial resource tools -- Products or pain relievers
This past year saw not only the introduction, but also the increasingly widespread acceptance, of sophisticated
solutions, including spatial analysis, for corporate Intranets and the Internet. Intelligent raster and vector data,
buffering and overiay, network tracing, and other GIS functionality are now available to end-users. Performance
times at least matching that of desktop systems is now the benchmark for Web-based GIS systems. On top of all
this, the GIS portion of web site development is now significantly easier. Even the differences between
Netscape's and Microsoft's browsers are now invisible to the end user.
The distribution of GIS functionality to disparate nodes on intranets and the Internet, and increasingly powerful,
system-resident "smarts" on system elements like RDBMS'S, can't be overstated in terms of their significance to
the GIS industry. As corporate and public organizations rely more and more on it to distribute information, the
Web has become ubiquitous. All mission-critical information related activities -- GIS especially -- have to
become part of organization's Web strategy. This translates into a requirement for platform-independent
applications that non-GIS specialists find easy to employ, but powerful and insightful when applied. It means a
requirement for low maintenance on the desktop and high reliability network tools that gain the support of IS
departments. It means a requirement for leading edge "Internet tools in the box" delivering rapid application
development and a faster return on investment. And it means performance measured in seconds, not minutes,
just as other Web applications are judged. It means just the right spatial information, in just the right form, in
just the right time. This requires three new guiding principles.
First, the most effective approach to GIS today is through targeted applications such as operations management
systems that can be tied into enterprise resource planning systems and "traditional" GIS systems in marketing,
customer service, or other departments. The key is to solve one problem at a time and then expand the value of
the solution throughout the organization. Central to this is the realization that GIS is not at the center of the
organization, but rather a key piece of the organization's information technology.
Another key factor is implementation times. Horror stories of multi-year installations without results have
plagued the GIS industry. Now, companies like Nevada Power Corporation are implementing full-scale outage
management systems in 18 months, including data conversion, application development, installation, and
training. These examples of rapid deployment are becoming more and more common. They are made possible
by fitting the GIS solution into the broader customer needs, not putting GIS at the center of the customer's
universe.
The third key principle to solving customer issues with GIS is getting the customer's data into the users' hands
where they need it. That may be on the vice president's desktop, the engineer's workstation, or the technician's
laptop in the field. After all, solving customer pain is best done at the site of the pain. With advances in internetbased
GIS, computing power, and mobile computing, this challenge is now being met. Sprint, for example, is
using a web-based GIS to deliver spatial information across employees in North America for 11 different
applications, ranging from facilities management, real estate management, legal, inside and outside plant
operations, marketing, and call-before-you-dig programs.
Maybe the bridgehead has been successfully established. I certainly think so. Each day new applications of a
Web-based GIS are deployed to take real advantage of the benefits inherent in the Internet itself. GIS on the 'net
-acting as both catalyst and enabler - is allowing us to use this technology to solve customer issues in new,
more comprehensive, ever more potent ways to bypass the technology barricades and truly put information to
work.
