Dangermond: Focusing on Business Value at #ESRIUC

The tone of Jack Dangermond’s presentation at the Esri Senior Executive Seminar that gathers an elite group of information technology leaders on the day before the UC kicks off was decidedly more “business-like” than usual. In years past, Dangermond’s message was more visionary and thoughtful. This year, his passion was directed toward the “business value” of GIS.

“GIS is increasingly used by senior executives and policy makers,” said Dangermond. “GIS is already successful; GIS is changing things…from the bottom up.” He went on to observe that while Google and Bing: Maps are “simple” they are opening the world’s eyes to think spatially. “GIS is quietly sneaking in to change the way we work. Local Governments are the best example of this. [They is] not just integration of applications; but integration of workflows thus improving collaboration across organizations; transactions are immediately integrated and available. This is a core vision,” he said.

Dangermond spoke of new “patterns” affecting the nature of GIS usage by business and government such as the use of web-based applications, cloud architectures and open data sharing policies. “This isn’t just about money…it’s about leveraging; about organizing. GIS is about spatial analysis…the logic of combining overlays. GIS is about workflows…it’s about doing this, before you do this, before you do this,” he said.

He used the phrase “sharing knowledge bits” to illustrate that lots of data is being published via the Web in a spirit of openness. “I think this is a shift in the way we’ve done GIS in the past,” said Dangermond. He urged to audience not to consider GIS as “just a research effort” but to understand the “clear business value.” Increasingly, organizations must justify the resources to support the use of geospatial analysis thus requiring a champion that understands how GIS works and has the leadership ability to communicate the business value.

Dr. Roger Tomlinson: The Early Years #esriuc

#ESRIUC EdUC: Edu Challenges for Beginners and Enterprise GIS

Due to some tech issues I attended but two EdUC sessions, but they revealed two different places GIS education finds challenges and opportunities.

The first one, “Teaching with Web GIS” had the always energetic Joe Kerski of ESRI looking at why and how to teach GIS using Web GIS. He noted one of the big opportunities was in fact mixing Web and desktop GIS. The mix of students included teachers and 4H students. While many Web GIS sites were visited (ESRI’s Make a Map, ArcLessons to name two) the challenge remains: what educational objectives of the underlying courses (conversation, social studies, math, etc.) were being taught? The work of instructors is to find how to use GIS to teach those objectives. The good news? There are many, many Web resources that teachers and students can learn and use quickly, keeping the potential focus on the content, not on “learning GIS.” I should point out that while ESRI offers many sites that can be used this way, other technology providers do too. Many are just good “mashups.” BTW, when the latest Silverlight version was not on all the machines raising an issue with accessing ArcGIS Explorer Online Kerski was quick to note that teaching with Web GIS does have pitfalls!

At the other end of the spectrum from educators “just starting” with GIS, was a session titled “Enhancing Teaching and Learning with GIS” moderated by ESRI’s Michael Gould. That was aimed at the university educator and addressed among other things the challenge of bringing GIS not just into the university but using it across the curriculum and the university. Gould’s comments around the papers suggested ESRI’s goal of universities truly buying into an enterprise solution: using the technology not only for education in many departments but also to run physical plant, campus safety, marketing and other “business” tasks.