This document discusses how businesses can benefit from spatial thinking and GIS technology. It suggests that businesses need to track the location, expense, revenue, and audit trail of their assets and be able to report on them. However, businesses do not need new technologies just for their own sake if existing solutions already work well. The document advocates keeping solutions simple, fitting them to the intended audience, improving work flows, and shifting from data gathering to data analysis. It also stresses the importance of understanding user needs and modeling work processes through user interviews before implementing geospatial techniques.

1. Business driven
spatial thinking
Andrew Zolnai
www.zolnai.ca

2. What does Business need?
• Track its assets
– Location
– Expense
– Revenue
– Audit-trail
• Report on its assets
– Inside: ISO
– Outside: SOX

3. What does Businesses not need?
• New for Newness’ sake
– Disrupt what works already
– Creates downtime
– Increases recovery time
• Immutable attitudes
– Not invented here
– Ad-hoc procedures
– If it ain't broken, don't fix it

4. What works
• Simple Q&A systems
• Fit to the audience
• Google Search -> My Search
• GPS phones and PDAs
• Keep it under the hood
• Improve work flows
• Add score-cards
From 90% time gathering data
...to 90% time analysing data
(Hurricane Katrina Response Team
www.idw.com, www.microsoft.com)

5. What works 2
• Automobiles as a past analogue
– Mercedes Benz once thought the car market related to
the number of available chauffeurs
– Today we neither know nor care how an ignition starter
works...

6. What do users want
• Intuitive map interfaces
– Google Earth
• Yet geodetic accuracy
– National Geographic Map
Machine

7. What do users want 2
• That will speak to
audiences
• Public: posters
• DBA: web map services
Natural Resources Canada
http://nrcan.gc.ca

8. The solution
• Model the work process
– Interview users
– Build a model (1)
– Refine it to fit its use
– Run it iteratively
– Display the results
– Get user feedback
– Go back to 1...

9. The solution 2
• Listen to the user
– Absorb their work process
– Be lead by their experience
– Stick to their knitting
• Cooperate
– They needn't learn
geomatics
– You needn't acquire
their expertise

10. Lessons learned
• Business process first
– Stakeholders / Regulators
– End users / Administrators
• Geospatial technique next
– Model the process
– Find tools that fit...
• Everything has a
location component
Land use classification at continental scales –
LADA Stratification Task Force – www.fao.org