The industry leadership panel at the close of today’s ESRI Survey and Engineering GIS Summit raised many issues that provided good audience dialog. The panel title focused on machine control, but the discussion quickly evolved to take on certification and licensing, liability issues and the whole future of the surveying profession.
Machine control is biting into surveyor’s revenue stream because engineers in some states can simply turn over digital terrain models direct to the contractor for input into GPS-guided graders and bulldozers without using a surveyor to stake and check the quality of the work. The function of the surveyor before machine control was to convert the plan to the ground and to check and certify the quality of the plan. Without the surveyor as quality arbiter, the question of liability appears to be on the design engineer, which may not be understood by many engineering firms.
In the past, surveyors were the ones to provide topo maps. Increasingly topos or digital elevation models are provided by LIDAR, which eliminates field work. Questions arise about who provides ground control before and after a project, and who checks the quality of the project.
Several panelists suggested there’s an increasing need for certification of GIS professionals to ensure the accuracy of the data that they input, but others dismissed the thought indicating that a professional attitude was all that’s necessary. One audience member suggested that perhaps there’s even a need to certify the software to ensure that it maintains positional accuracy.
An issue of capacity is another pressure on surveyors. There are fewer licensed surveyors in every state, and the lack of surveyors is creating workarounds where expediency is needed. If surveyors are going to insist on certification and more of a role in data accuracy, what is to be done when there’s too much work to perform?
Without the job of interpreting plans, a few panelists suggested that surveyors need to “run for cover in GIS,” where there’s plenty of work and an increasing need for more accuracy. All panelists agreed that the role of surveyors in GIS will expand dramatically, even though a few felt the future of the profession was in jeopardy.
