Jack Dangermond spoke this morning during the introductory portion of the Senior Executive Seminar, providing perspective in terms of past accomplishments, and great enthusiasm for the current state of the technology, and the role it will play in the future.
The day began with a short viewing of a 1967 film, Data for Decision, that features the work of Roger Tomlinson, the “father of GIS.” Dangermond acknowledged Tomlinson’s amazing accomplishment to have conceived and built a fully operational system from nothing, and to build it in the context of applications. Despite these early inroads, GIS is only now going mainstream. GIS is being used systemically across organizations as a fundamental pillar in the IT stack alongside such systems as enterprise resource planning (ERP).
While GIS is already successful, with a quarter million organizations using the technology. Many are realizing for the first time that we can use the technology to move up a step, to see, understand and manage things through GIS.
GIS is slowly changing things. Changing how we organize and reason, and to start thinking spatially. GIS is also quietly helping us organize how we work. Tying measurement, analysis, and decision making to those that carry out the decision. The world wants to go deeper, to look at relationships, patterns and processes. GIS is helping people to collaborate, connect activities and disciplines. A map is worth more than a picture, it’s worth a million worlds, giving the ability to understand things quickly, and to see the issues as a new storytelling medium for communication.
Data and technology are enabling phenomenal growth of GIS. Data are growing exponentially, whether it’s satellite and aerial imagery, LIDAR, sensor data, or crowd sourced data. The tools and technology are also advancing quickly to take advantage of the data. The patterns of implementation have moved from desktop to server, to federated, to the cloud. At the cloud level GIS allows services from many places to be integrated dynamically.
The mobile piece is a big part of this next level of GIS use. Just this week Esri launched the ArcGIS app for the iPhone, and it’s now up to 12,000 every day, doubling every day. The application allows you to bring a little geography into the field, but also to go the other direction to collect information. GIS is social media and social networking, and the GIS is going to enriched by this quite rapidly.
The Web cloud pattern is facilitated by open standards and open data sharing practices. Knowledge isn’t just maps, organizations are building applications, and serving the core information and services behind the maps. Allowing us to lift the hood up and see the data below so that people can put it together to make applications of their own. It’s enabling citizen science, open government, open government, etc.
ArcGIS 10 is a complete system for geographic information that is easier, more powerful, and everywhere. It allows the discovery, creation, management, visualization, analysis and collaboration. It’s also a flexible system that allows us to discover, create, manage, visualize, analyze and collaborate.
One of the ways that it’s simplifying the complexity of data models, data, symbology, analysis, workflows and metadata behind the map. We can search and find great applications or maps, in an environment where you can share. It’s a shift in how we’ve done GIS, allowing us to see a lot of distributed knowledge and allowing us to share that back with a larger community.
GIS will continue to expand to support organizations and supply true business value. But, GIS requires more than just the technology, it requires vision, management support, governance, financing and good planning. It also requires good people to do the work.
At the center of all the growth of GIS is the Internet, and it’s astonishing to think that it only took shape 20 years ago, and now is reaching everyone across the globe. Access to GIS via the Internet will change things even more.
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I believe this is a YT vid of Roger Tomlinson’s 1967 system:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryWcq7Dv4jE
Thanks for the YouTube reminder! I’ve inserted a link.