The Changing Face of GIS
The face of GIS is changing. Don’t take my word for it, just ask the Cambridge Massachusetts think tank, Daratech (www.daratech.com/). They recently outlined key indicators of the changing face of GIS. Even without the efforts of this heavy-weight research firm, you can see the changes. Just look around. It doesn’t take a geographer to see the map of our industry is changing before our very eyes.
Once part of a maverick group of upstarts in this industry, I am now the old guard. I may not know all the nuances of today’s latest technology, but I know the history of the industry. After all, I lived through it, and to some extent helped create it.
Tech comes at a price
Today, you can add a functioning GIS system to your five hundred dollar computer for little or no money. With a click of a browser button you can even get your hands on more free data than you might imagine.
In the pre-PC days of GIS, you easily could spend $50,000 for your green phosphorus monotone display, a hundred thousand or so for software, a half million on a processor, a few million on data and another few million on development costs. For this you got the opportunity to tell your management why this was so much better than paper maps.
The changing face
I will not bore you with the details of how things changed; you can probably fill in the blanks. But for all the changes in the first three decades, we haven't seen anything yet. Guess what? GIS is becoming a demand product, especially in government and utilities. Management actually knows it exists.
Today, we are a far more mobile end-user. Your boss has a laptop and a PDA, and expects to get data on the go. That includes GIS, or as s/he might put it “location based data.” More than ever, the GIS user who used to look at images of land from a dark basement room, is now outdoors expecting the data attributes of the land under foot to be on the screen of his or her Blackberry.
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