Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/78956
many commercial concerns and government agencies rely on map display and geocoding to solve critical business problems. During the same time, there have been profound advances in data content and software that have driven the ubiquity of maps on the Internet, in cars and on mobile devices. What does this mean for enterprise GIS users? How E is GIS changing the industries it serves? Does the ascent of the consumer hurt or help enterprise users? This article takes a fresh look at enterprise GIS—what it means, who's using it and, most importantly, what we can expect in the future. Enterprise GIS? There are two common ways to define "enterprise" when it comes to GIS. The first is to think about data or software that's pervasive throughout a business unit; it's available to any and all employees interested in using it. This arrangement often is formalized with an Enterprise License Agreement. The second definition, and the one used for this arti- cle, defines the users. In this case, enterprise refers to business-to-business (B2B) users who employ dis- play and/or geocoding functionality to solve business problems. In this model, such users are differentiated from the consumer segment—users at the end of the business-to-consumer (B2C) chain. So, for specific examples of what constitutes the enterprise GIS market, consider the self-stated industries served on the Nokia (NAVTEQ) and TomTom Licensing (Tele Atlas) Web sites: Nokia (NAVTEQ) Fleet & Logistics GIS* Government Media TomTom Licensing (Tele Atlas) Financial Services Geomarketing Government & Public Sector Automotive Developers Internet Portable & Wireless * Nokia defines GIS as Geomarketing, Asset Management, Custom Call Centers, Command and Control, Demand Modeling, Operations and Fault Management, and Field-Force Management. Insurance Retail Transportation & Logistics Utilities & Telecommunications Internet Portable & Wireless nterprise GIS has been an important part of many industries' success for decades: insur- ance, banking, retail, marketing, real estate— A dot-density map shows the distribution of features by geography and makes it easy to visualize spatial concentration. This graphic, for example, shows the number of operating farms by state (one dot equals 1,000 farms). Further examples of enterprise GIS users include real estate, site selection, territory management, education, health care and quick-service restaurants. Although some enterprise GIS use cases may include routing and navigation (e.g., certain transportation and field-force applications as well as some government applications such as E-911), most of the market is focused on display and geocoding. Creating Users The U.S. Census Bureau is widely credited with the technical innovation and development that spurred the creation of business-focused solutions enabled or assisted by geospatial data. In 1967, the Census Bureau deployed the Dual Independent Map Encoding (DIME) system to convert analog maps into encoded data by representing intersections, streets and census- delineated areas as points, lines and polygons—all while maintaining topology. This early data had comparatively higher relative accuracy (the relative positions of features to each other on the map compared to the relative positions of those same features to each other in the real world) than absolute accuracy (the position of a feature on a map compared to the position of that same feature in the real world). AUGUST 2O12 / WWW . GEOPLA CE . COM 15 CONSUMER ENTERPRISE USDA/ESRI WORLD STREET MAP/MAPCONNECT ENTERPRISE/CHRIS MABEY