To listen to some people, you would think you could solve your problems, your organisationís problems and the world's problems using GIS.
Sure, GIS, or Geographical Information Systems, are of considerable use to many people and organisations; and may well be of use to you. But it must be remembered that GIS is itself only a set of tools to be applied by people and it is people who solve problems. So what is important to understand is how you will solve your organisationís problems with its help.
Whether yours is a small business, a multinational conglomerate, a government department or local authority, you can bank on two things: a lot of your information will be geographically referenced, and the more information you have, the harder it becomes to manage and interpret. It is a fact that up to 70% of all information in circulation possesses a common denominator: geography. In this case, GIS is important to you because it helps you make decisions based upon geographical information. Unlike any other type of information handling tool, GIS can understand the concept of location.
Consider, for example, a system which enables its user to combine and manipulate demographic, lifestyle and other customer-related data to quite literally pinpoint areas of untapped business opportunity. This process of monitoring and predicting social and economic change is an activity which the Henley Centre for Economic Forecasting in the UK views as critical to business success. Some other examples:
GIS is hard to define precisely as it may be seen as operating at a number of levels, and will mean different things to different people. To some, GIS is a set of software tools that is used to input, store, manipulate, analyse and display geographical information. This is a technical definition, which may emphasise the historical development of GIS as a combination of Computer Aided Design (CAD) and digital cartographic handling capabilities integrated with database software.
To others, GIS may be a philosophy, a way of making decisions within an organisation where all information is held centrally and is related by its location. This is a more strategic definition.
Although these definitions may help, trying to define GIS is not really necessary, as systems for handling geographical information come in many different forms. It is important, however, to understand that a successful GIS may not be an off-the-shelf solution to your problems and will require considerable thought for a successful implementation.
A GIS is a system of three interconnected components, each equally important and necessary to its success. These components are spatial data, software/hardware tools, and a specific problem or objective.
GIS has taken off in a big way over the past two decades. Moving from the realms of academic research, the technology was first harnessed to the needs of large, information-hungry organisations such as local authorities, environmental agencies, emergency services and utilities providers.
More recently, GIS has leapfrogged onto the back of advances in desktop computing to find application in every conceivable area of business activity. And it is here that the logic of GIS is impeccable, given that competitive advantage is ultimately about delivering the right product or service to the right place at the right time. Some 300 proprietary software packages are on offer starting at around $500.
World-wide figures for GIS investment speak for themselves. Global revenues from GIS software sales alone are growing at an annual rate in excess of 13% and are likely to top the $1.3 billion mark by 1997, according to research company Dataquest.
Like all IS and IT, it is to support decision making. GIS provides those decision makers within your organisation with an environment for making decisions which take account of location. Questions such as where are? what is the distribution of? and so on may all be answerable via a GIS.
It may sound ridiculous, but numerous implementations of GIS have gone wrong because the organisation was not really sure how it could use it. A good starting point is to consider how your organisation uses spatial data at the moment, and whether the current practises can be automated. Additionally, you need to identify any new processes which would be useful to help decision making, but which time and other factors currently prohibit.
If automating your existing processes is possible, and with new processes will produce an overall benefit to your organisation, then you have the basis for a system objective. However, be warned that all of these benefits may be notoriously difficult to prove in financial terms. Research shows that the benefits of GIS typically spread far beyond one single factor, some of which may not even have been thought of at the conception of the project. This may be why convincing directors to invest in GIS has been found to be a major stumbling block to project implementation, since the whole picture is hard to envisage at the outset.
In setting out a business case for GIS, you will also need to decide how GIS would support your current business objectives. Ask yourself:
Here is a list of how other organisations are using GIS, and which you may be able to relate to something which could be of benefit to your own organisation:
Retail 
Utilities 
Environment 
Local Government 
Health care 
Transportation 
Financial Services