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How you Benefit

GIS Enterprise Solutions and IT Strategies that Include GIS

There is a growing interest in and awareness of the economic and strategic value of GIS in large organizations. The benefits of GIS generally fall into five basic categories.

  1. Cost savings resulting from greater efficiency. These are associated either with carrying out the mission (i.e., labor savings from automating or improving a workflow), or improvements in the mission itself. A good case for both of these is Sears, which has implemented GIS in its logistics operations and made dramatic improvements. Sears considerably reduced the time it takes for dispatchers to create routes for their home delivery trucks (about 90%). It also benefited enormously in reducing the costs of carrying out the mission (i.e., 12%-15% less drive time by selecting routes using GIS). Sears also improved customer service, increased efficiency with respect to "returns" (return visits to the same site), and provided more efficient scheduling of customers.

  2. Better decision making. This typically has to do with making better decisions about location. Common examples include real estate site selection, route/corridor selection, zoning, planning, conservation, natural resource extraction, etc. Making the correct decision about a location is increasingly seen as strategic to the success of an organization.

  3. More communication. GIS-based maps and visualizations greatly assist in understanding situations and story telling. They are a new kind of language that improves communication between different teams, departments, disciplines, professional fields, organizations, and the public.

  4. Better geographic information recordkeeping. Many organizations have a primary responsibility of maintaining authoritative records about the status and change of geography. Cultural examples are zoning, population census, land ownership, and administrative boundaries. Physical geography examples include forest inventories, scientific inventories, environmental measurements, water flows, and a whole host of geographic accountings.

    GIS provides a strong system framework for managing these types of systems with full transaction support and reporting tools. These systems are conceptually similar to other information systems in that they deal with data management and transactions, as well as standardized reporting (e.g., maps) of changing information. However, they are fundamentally different because of the unique data models and hundreds of specialized tools used in supporting GIS applications and workflows.

  5. Managing geographically. In government and many large corporations, GIS is becoming essential to understand what's going on. GIS information products are now being used to communicate among senior administrators and executives at the highest levels of government. They are providing a visual framework for conceptualizing, understanding, and prescribing action. Examples of this include briefing about the status of various geographic patterns and relationships including land use, crime, the environment, and defense/security situations.

    GISs are increasingly being implemented as enterprise information systems. This goes far beyond simply spatial enabling of business tables in a DBMS. Geography is emerging as a new way to organize and manage organizations. Just like enterprise-wide financial systems transformed the way organizations were managed in the '60s, '70s, and '80s, similarly, geographic information systems are transforming the way that organizations manage their assets, serve their customers/citizens, make decisions, and communicate.

    Examples in the private sector include most utilities, forestry and oil companies, and most commercial/retail businesses. Their assets and resources are now being maintained as an enterprise information system, not only to support the day-to-day work management tasks, but also to provide a broader context for assets and resource management.

Open, Scalable, Standards-Based GIS Technology for Your Organization

GIS technology provides the framework for a shared spatial data infrastructure and a distributed architecture. Geographic data can be gathered and organized to support the generation of information products that are integrated into the business strategy of your organization.

ESRI has developed its products based on open standards to ensure a high level of interoperability across platforms, databases, development languages, and applications. ESRI is committed to supporting and actively leading efforts associated with such standards.   

The following is an overview of the specific standards in hardware, software, and Web services that ESRI software supports.

  • Handheld Devices: ESRI software supports Windows CE, Pocket PC, Web browsers, J2ME, and 802.11 to enable our users to leverage the growing use of handheld devices.
  • Desktop Computers: ESRI provides a range of desktop software that is supported on Windows, Java, Unix, and Linux.
  • Servers: ESRI provides a range of server software that is supported on Unix, Linux, Windows, and Java.
  • DBMS: ESRI provides software that supports the following commercial database management systems (DBMS): Oracle, IBM DB2, Informix, and SQL Server including support for all spatial types.
  • Networks: ESRI software supports protocols such as TCP/IP and HTTP, allowing for the transfer of data and HTML documents.
  • Developer Environments: Users have a choice of development environment when using ESRI software including VB, C++, .NET, and Java (J2ME, J2SE, J2EE, ASP/JSP).
  • Web Services/APIs: Web standards such as XML, SOAP, UDDI, and WSDL are supported. Web APIs such as WFS, WMS, XML, and GML are also supported.

For your business strategy, this means compatibility and interoperability support with major enterprise systems such as

  • Enterprise resource planning (ERP)
  • Customer resource management (CRM)
  • Enterprise application integration (EAI)
  • Work management systems and others

For GIS technology, this means standards that support

  • Data sharing
  • Direct data access
  • Metadata
  • Web APIs and services
  • Data models

Geography and GIS-Sustaining Our World

Our goal is to make GIS a mainstream technology for facilitating better interoperability and integration with the rest of the IT infrastructure. We envision GIS as an integral part of the coordinated information management system, not just a project here and there.

We invite you to browse the best practices that have been empowered by the use of ESRI's ArcGIS product family and to think about how this powerful technology can improve your world.