Emerging Location Technology – Improving Understanding & Changing Roles

Continuing our reprint of some of the questions and answers from the recent ESRI UC, here we look at improving understanding, and the changing role of GIS professionals:

“Improving Understanding – The ability of GIS to reduce large volumes of data from multiple sources, disciplines, and organizations into simple and meaningful information suggests it is providing a new medium for contributing to human understanding. It’s a language that is increasingly recognized as a powerful means for reducing complexity and quickly understanding the dimensions of a situation.”

“The changing role of the GIS professionals – The best days of the GIS professional are yet to come. We are just beginning to introduce technology (ArcGIS Online and mobile) that will allow GIS professionals to support and connect everyone in their organization and ultimately society. Applications start with simple mapping and visualization but will extend to include analysis that leverages the rich content managed in GIS environments”

New Location Technology & Mobile GIS Experts

We certainly live in changing times. As a location technology development company, had you asked us 10 years ago if we felt our technology was a central tool in our clients hands, we should have said no. Our work was done then mostly for public sector clients, and we worked directly with and for GIS departments. Today that has begun to change. As new platforms emerge and new (mobile) devices are launched, location technology is moving to front and centre. We aren’t there yet, but existing and new clients are turning their attention to broadening the reach of their location data and tools. This will help to dramatically improve company efficiency; allowing the right people at the right time and place to make accurate, fast decisions.

Though we are GIS experts our skills really centre around location. Our location technology expertise, combined with the plethora of new tools now available will allow us to build the next generation of location technology solutions for our clients.