Dorothy, this isn’t Kansas anymore. It could be Anytown, USA. On my last trip to Kansas, it wasn’t the wheat fields or flatness that amazed me but the repetitive retail landscape. It seemed that every town was a clone of the one I had just left—the same restaurant chains, grocers, drugstores, and general merchants. Was it an unholy alliance? Had real estate developers, government, and retailers reached perfect agreement on what every town needed and limited the choice to a small menu of options? However, the more I looked, the more I found exceptions. The harder I tried to quantify the way towns were similar to each other, the more I noticed the differences and came away knowing that local flavors dominate.

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Those of us in the GIS community take it for granted that the incorporation of GIS enriches effective asset management practices, to the point where we find it difficult to understand how good asset management could be practiced without GIS. In reality however, most departments of transportation (DOTs) report only limited success in both good asset management practice and incorporating GIS into their asset management practices. So, why the gap between promise and reality?

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When I ran an electric utility operations division, one of my favorite employees was a guy named Stanley. Stanley started as a line worker; climbed poles; became a foreman, later a supervisor; then managed all the crews in the region. I remember how Stanley worked.

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The idea of smart growth has been around for decades. Though many planners passionately advocate and practice it in their day-to-day activities, many others are equally skeptical of its practical benefits. Further clouding the issue are different opinions on what smart growth really is.

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A considerable amount of my workday is devoted to studying and strategizing around the Gov 2.0 trends. I have come to recognize that there are two distinct communities that approach the topic from completely different worlds.

The first group is focused on technology aimed at improving the delivery of government services. Its dialog revolves around concepts such as cloud computing, crowd sourcing, social media, open data, next-wave applications, and mashups. The second group acknowledges these technologies but is more interested in reminding government that it is failing its constituents. To this group, Gov 2.0 is more of a movement to change government, much like the Tea Party movement for tax reform. More importantly, this group recognizes that citizens cannot be silent bystanders if they want government that works for them.

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In my 30 years in law enforcement and the subsequent 12 years working with law enforcement agencies around the world, I have become familiar with a number of different modern policing concepts taking root in agencies big and small. These include community policing, problem-oriented policing, predictive policing, and evidenced-based policing. More recently, I have been intrigued by the concepts of place-based policing and the writings of Dr. David Weisburd of George Mason University.

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Our Failed Financial Institutions Need to Meet Their Community Covenant

We dodged a bullet. The global economic meltdown, which saw 140 banking organizations closed in the U.S. in 2009, has affected every industry and sector of life. Governments spent billions trying to correct systemic failures that began with the subprime mortgage crisis and led to a vicious cycle of reduced credit, business bankruptcy, and soaring unemployment. A 1930s-style depression was avoided at great cost to our public and private financial systems, but it could have been much worse.

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I recently finished reading National Land Parcel Data: A Vision for the Future, and I think it serves as a call to action for all surveyors. The book articulates the demand for a good national parcel database, including some excellent policy discussion on how to get started and how to make progress. Every surveyor who plans to work for the next 10 years should read this book.

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Planners constantly make decisions and have to think on their feet. Though the voices of elected leaders and officials ring loudly in their minds, planners must be careful to listen closely to the voices of the citizens they serve. Planning for the people requires involving communities from the very onset of the planning process, which must be comprehensible, transparent, legitimate, and interactive. When planners fail to engage communities and only follow the status quo, the outcomes are undesirable at best.

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Reducing the risks caused by climate change is an immense challenge. Scientists, policy makers, developers, engineers, and many others have used GIS to better understand a complex situation and offer some tangible solutions. Technology offers a means to assess, plan, and implement sustainable programs that can affect us 10, 20, and 100 years into the future.

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Geography Provides Many Advantages

Over the past 30 years, technology has revolutionized the pipeline industry. We moved from total stations to GPS for survey activities, paper-and-pen field data collection migrated to mobile devices, and generation of alignment sheets is now completed by automated processing. While we have implemented these changes and many others, we continue to use the same system for defining the position of pipeline and inline assets: stationing.

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GIS can help you answer tough smart grid questions

Smart grid is about four things:

• Smart meters—Smart grid gives us more information about the energy we use. Smart meters will help us use less energy. Consequently, we will save money and reduce our carbon footprints.

• Better electric reliability—Our electric infrastructure is old and fallible. Smart grid includes smart sensors to help utilities locate problems and help the electric utility grid heal itself.
  

• Making green energy work—Solar and wind power are quite different from the traditional sources of electricity such as hydro, coal, natural gas, and nuclear. Like the weather, green resources are unpredictable. Smart grid will work to regulate the ebb and flow of renewable energy.
  

• Smart grid phone home—By tapping telecommunication networks, smart grid will alert utilities to problems before they even happen. 

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Are you ready for geo-accounting?

The winds of change are blowing. A White House memo [PDF] recently sent to all executive department heads and agencies provides policy principles for submitting future agency budgets. This memo calls for place-based considerations in 2011 budgets. Picking up on the theme that “everything happens somewhere,” the Obama administration has connected the dots!

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Why do so few insurers use GIS?

Most insurers are grappling with the consequences of a soft market and increased financial volatility. With trust levels at their lowest in over 50 years, insurers who do not fully understand the risks they are writing face a tough future. The property landscape has changed dramatically, and credit markets remain tight. More uncertainty is introduced every day as globalization, climate change, and ever-moving patterns of land use, crime, and arson alter the geography of cities forever.

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