Fed UC: So, what’s an enterprise?

Before things got going at the first day of the ESRI Federal User Conference 2007 (the seventh annual) I had a chance to speak with Jeff Peters. He let me know the conference had about 1,500 pre-registrants and he expected several hundred people to register on-site for the three day event.

Since Peters heads up both the federal and non-federal parts of the office, I thought he was a good person to answer my question about the definition of “enterprise” something I’ve not been comfortable with for some time. He pointed to three characteristics:

- thought is given to architecture (might be SOA or something else), but there is thought about it
- the aim of solutions, not just software
- integration of GIS with other aspects of the organization, not just “GIS by itself”