Dangermond Addresses CIOs and Managers at #ESRIUC Senior Executive Seminar

Jack Dangermond, ESRI founder and president, opened this year’s senior executive seminar (SES) on the first day of the ESRI User’s Conference (UC) with many observations about GIS now that the company has reached a milestone by celebrating its 40th year in business. "As a global society we are becoming more and more geographically literate…GIS is changing how we organize and communicate. Bringing these specializations together is facilitated in part by geography.

Dangermond is very focused on getting people out of their stove pipes of thinking.

"In public sector, the sharing of knowledge is critical and now we have a web platform to facilitate that. It’s my own personal belief that we have to move very rapidly and become more intelligent about what we are doing."

He stressed the need to think of GIS more of an analysis tool. "In the future, as the technology keeps evolving, we will have geography not simply for visualization. [There are] faster machines; virtualization; now cloud computing. It will take professionals that can stitch all the pieces together. As managers, this is one of the big dilemmas. Leave the data in place or create centralized access."


Dangermond asked a more rhetorical question about why GIS is expanding? "It’s becoming clearer about the business value. The world needs more holistic thinking and integration: across departments, across disciplines, across organizations. If I could convince you that [using GIS] is a 40x ROI in logistics wouldn’t you do it? [Plus] there is more interest from the IT world about integrating geospatial data," said Dangermond.