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first published week of: 08/17/2015
When I was doing my undergraduate degree and started working as a (Geographic Information Systems) GIS professional over 20 years ago GIS was considered cutting edge across a range of industries from retail, to environmental management and defence. It drove so many issues from store location, weed management and mining analysis.
At Lend Lease back in the late 1990’s we were able to differentiate ourselves as leaders in the retail property sector because of the GIS investments and prowess particularly around trade area analysis and competitive modeling. It enabled us to have a point of difference against the larger Westfield group for leasing managers and fund managers alike.
We are now in 2015 and the best use cases of GIS are still store location, environmental location and demographic analysis. Every vendor case study I see has store location and resource management just as it was in the late 1990’s. Every user and even (sometimes with a gentle arm twist) laments the lack of progress in GIS.
The contrast to the explosive growth of other technology is overwhelming. In that time we have seen the rise of the laptop, Microsoft Office, email, the Internet, iPhones, Tablets, SaaS, Cognitive Computing yet GIS still appears to be stuck in a time warp of the 1990’s. continued…