There’s certainly a large community of users of ESRI’s GIS software that apply these tools to environmental applications, yet there hasn’t been a focused effort within the company on environmental solutions. That has now changed with the hiring of Dr. Robin D. Smith as environmental industry manager with a background in air and waste management and toxicology. With Smith’s mandate on the stewardship of our environment, we will see further software and services from ESRI that place an emphasis on solving sustainability challenges.
The environmental management and assessment community are a project oriented group, and GIS is slow to penetrate these workflows. Often the budgets for environmental assessment are low, without a mandate for digital collection of data. This reporting is too often seen as a necessary evil, and there just isn’t a focus on ongoing use of the data downstream in the project cycle.
I spoke to Smith yesterday, and he shared some of his history. While he’s been aware of GIS since early in his career, he became an evangelist a few years ago when working for an environmental engineering firm in Boulder, Colo. that made heavy use of GIS tools throughout the assessment process. He indicated that considerable time was saved in meetings by combining digital data and using the GIS as a means to arrive at consensus about project decisions.
There’s an increasing global interest in decision support tools that balance the needs of the economy while taking into account environmental impacts. ESRI is making a concentrated effort to fill the needs of this market.
I spoke to Smith at length about his background and his mandate in this new position. I’ll be posting the interview in its entirety soon. You can read more about Smith in this ESRI Press Release that went out today.
