Growth in Consumer- and Enterprise Uses of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Technology

CIO — The modern citizens of the medieval, canal-dissected town of Brugge, Belgium, must have thought it strange to see packs of businesspeople following the dim green glow of cell phone screens through the city at twilight. What they were witnessing was a demonstration of one of the latest innovations in geographic information systems technology by Tele Atlas North America, a Menlo Park, Calif.-based digital data provider.

The first night in Brugge, the Tele Atlas conference participants divided into groups of 10 to 12 people, with each team given a cell phone into which they entered a code. What followed was dinner, entertainment and a tour of the city?guided by the GPS-enabled cell phone. Instructions appeared on the screen, telling the participants to follow different streets and alleys as they made their way through the town. At certain destinations, the teams would enter location-specific information, such as the date on a 15th century guild house, to find out where the next course of their meal could be found.

While capabilities like this may seem futuristic, the technology and infrastructure to make it work are currently being rolled out in both Europe and Japan, and will soon be available in the United States. The FCC’s E911 mandate, which requires all wireless carriers to be able to locate a majority of their 911 callers by the end of this year (most major carriers failed to meet an October 2001 deadline) and to locate all callers by December 2005, will produce a slew of new consumer applications for GIS. But even though these natty technology services get the most attention, it’s the innovative enterprise-oriented GIS applications that are currently driving the growth in the GIS sector.

Mapping GIS Growth

In just the past three years the GIS market has changed radically, and a technology that was once considered too specialized to fall within the domain of the IS department has become just another enterprise technology, such as CRM or ERP.

The most important ingredient for GIS systems is data. Merely knowing your coordinates isn’t of much use unless you’re on a ship, but knowing what street you’re on, where the nearest hotel is and the fastest way to get there could be invaluable. For years, unfortunately, very little data of that type was publicly available, and what did exist was prohibitively expensive. But in the past few years a whole industry has risen around the collection and packaging of GIS-useful data?from basic street maps to census figures to business locations. And all of it is available for sale?cheap. That has greatly reduced both the cost and time needed to get a GIS application up and running.

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