Spatial resource tools -- Products or pain relievers

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.

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.