Spatial Roundtable

Retail GIS—Localization, Not Just Location

2010-08-16T08:08:59Z

The importance of knowing your neighbor

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.

Doing business locally is the new kind of normal. After years of building out networks almost without limit, the current recession changed everything. Retailers that bucked the trend did so because they have what their customers want: stores in the right markets, the right products for their catchment, and enough sales opportunity to overcome competition and changing consumer tastes. Location and geography-based analysis have helped companies shift focus from opening stores to improving store revenue and creating better promotions. Coupons have become cool again. We’re not just clipping them from the local paper. We’re willing to get them online and via our phones because we benefit from letting retailers integrate our online habits with our in-store purchases.

Retailers get a lot from this exchange because everything is local. The lifeblood of a store is return customers. With detailed, local knowledge, retailers can go beyond segmentation and customer profiles to individual characteristics, localized assortment management, and product-level stratification. Loyalty and CRM data comes alive, so companies can spot trends and respond, reduce markdown risks, and improve the balance sheet.

Like Dorothy, I know there’s a journey that we need to take to gain courage, a heart, or knowledge. Are we ready for the challenges on the yellow brick road? I don’t know, but GIS sure looks like a good weapon against the miseries of the Wicked Witch of the Great Recession.

Is being local really helping retailers succeed in delivering what customers want?

Transportation GIS: Promise and Reality

2010-07-23T07:07:10Z

GIS promise and DOT asset management reality

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?

First, despite our common beliefs in the power of GIS, I don’t think we have effectively demonstrated the inherent advantages of a GIS-based asset management system. Since the original 1991 Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA), the promise of better transportation infrastructure management and better capital improvement planning inherent in good asset management practice has been understood. Most DOTs have successfully implemented GIS-based pavement and bridge management systems, but the type of integrated cross-asset capital planning envisioned by the act is rare.

This is certainly not due to a lack of software programs or applications that facilitate such cross-asset modeling. Rather, a recent survey of GIS managers at DOTs pointed to the lack of support for and understanding of GIS-based asset management systems on the part of senior management. These executive managers need to be convinced of what some of their city-level counterparts have found: that the use of GIS allows them to better manage the information about their assets, better visualize the alternative options, and more effectively communicate those options to elected decision makers—all leading to better decisions concerning the allocation of scarce public resources.

Second, while better decision making is certainly a good thing, in today’s environment, we also need to demonstrate to executive managers that the effective use of GIS for asset management will save money. There needs to be a tangible return on investment to justify the expense associated with good asset management practice. The geospatial industry has not been effective at demonstrating how GIS can help asset managers save through better and more cost-effective management of existing assets, and how GIS can save money by allowing asset managers to better coordinate the timing and scheduling of cross-asset activities. Forward-thinking cities and counties have long recognized the ability of GIS to look at the strategic scheduling of maintenance across asset classes to avoid utility repairs on newly resurfaced roadways and other costly noncoordinated maintenance activities.

The promise of GIS-based asset management—an approach that strives to provide the best return on every dollar invested by maximizing system performance and minimizing life cycle costs—is yet to be realized in most state DOTs. We in the GIS community need to do a better job of communicating those benefits, or else this will be unlikely to change. This begs the question:

What can the GIS community do to fill the gap between GIS promise and DOT asset management reality?

Building a Knowledge Infrastructure for Utilities

2010-06-28T07:06:10Z

Preserving institutional knowledge

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.

As the hot, humid day would turn into evening, just when the crews returned to the service center, storm cells would start to form. If they matured, they could cause heavy rain, wind, thunder, lightning, and sometimes minitornadoes. Stanley had to decide whether to send the crews home or keep some or all the crews on overtime. No one really knew if the storm cells were going to dissipate or cause havoc to the electric system. If Stanley sent the crews home and a bad storm hit, it would take a long time to get the crews back to work. If he kept the crews on overtime and the cells dissipated, he would have wasted company money. Stanley almost always made the right call. He didn’t know it, but he was using spatial analytics in his head.

Then Stanley retired.

The average age of U.S. utility workers is almost 50. Thousands of workers like Stanley will leave the industry over the next several years. Imagine all the wisdom and analytic power that will be missing. People like Stanley know where infrastructure problems exist. They know where the utility has not trimmed trees. They know the location of old and frayed wires that are just waiting to fall down. They remember where storms generally hit and the problems storms cause.

What many utilities are missing is an ability to capture as much of that wisdom as possible before the Stanleys of the industry retire. What we need is a way to share what retiring workers know and how they know it. The common denominator of that knowledge is location. Utilities have been capturing facts in geographic information systems (GIS) for years. Today, GIS can capture observations and predictive information, collect data from all kinds of sources, and help utility staff make better risk predictions the way Stanley did. GIS can create geoprocessing models, which document the data sources, run the analysis, and produce the results in the form of a map. The key is to have these models validated and supplemented by experienced workers before they leave, so that utilities can truly build a knowledge infrastructure.

Can the utility GIS community provide a platform to build a knowledge infrastructure that leverages experienced workers before they leave?

Moving Smart Growth Forward

2010-06-04T08:06:32Z

Stepping beyond discussions and debates toward action

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.

In general, proponents are enamored of its compact and more sustainable patterns of development—the transit- and pedestrian-oriented nature, the mixture of activities and land uses, the reduction of urban sprawl, and the creation of a sense of place. Opponents are quick to point out the high concentration of people and consequent congestion that might ensue.

Not all agree on a definition of smart growth or its validity and polarizing ideological discussions result. To move past what is right and what is wrong—my belief versus yours—we need to look to technology. Simply analyzing the geography of growth and planning with geospatial technology moves conversations forward to a productive place. With a focus on variables that affect the things we all value, such as a high quality of life and more livable environments, we can leave disputes in the past and start making progress on behalf of the communities we serve.

How do you think technology advances the creation of efficient, well-planned (or smart) communities?

Gov 2.0 — Envisioning the Future of Delivering Government Services

2010-05-10T08:05:22Z

Restoring Trust in Government

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.

In the middle of it all are the common citizens who don’t even know that Gov 2.0 discussions are taking place. Interestingly, this group is significantly larger than the other two groups combined. Citizens simply want government to be there when they need it. Common to the Gov 2.0 discussions is the acknowledgment of the growing distrust of government.

So what is the solution for restoring trust in government and delivering government services when citizens need them? How do we get citizens to take an active role in government? One Gov 2.0 group suggests we should throw out existing systems and start trying new stuff. This group believes it can do a better job than government is doing now.

I personally believe the geographic information systems (GIS) community can step up to this challenge. We’ve already witnessed the power of GIS in the areas of transparency and accountability in restoring trust in government. After all, show people how government is spending tax dollars or determining where to place government services in the context of where they live and work and their children go to school, and the world makes more sense. GIS professionals simply need to streamline operations while developing solutions using authoritative data to serve their citizens directly.

Can the GIS community provide a platform for engagement that empowers citizens?

The Case for Place in Twenty-First Century Policing

2010-04-14T07:04:00Z

Tradition Versus Today's Reality

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.

One commonality that exists in all these policing approaches is geography—the simple fact that crimes, criminals, victims, and most of what law enforcement has to deal with have a location: a specific address, building, street corner, block, or similar microgeography. The research of Dr. Weisburd and others has demonstrated that a very small number of specific locations in studied communities generate a significantly disproportionate number of police calls. While criminals are frequently difficult to target due to their mobility, crime hot spots tend to be stable over long periods of time, providing a better opportunity for the focus of police operations.

Today’s technology coupled with solid analytics has given law enforcement a much greater opportunity to understand the nature of crime in our communities. This data-driven approach employs police databases with geographic information systems (GIS) and better analytic tools to provide police managers with a detailed picture of crime in their communities.

More than just connecting the dots, Weisburd’s studies have demonstrated that we have the ability to focus on specific crime hot spots to direct our policing efforts rather than focusing on the larger, traditional policing geographies such as beats, precincts, and areas. His studies have demonstrated that in an era of diminishing financial and personnel resources, this place-based approach provides an opportunity to put the right people in the right place at the right time rather than patrolling a larger geography in the hope of preventing crime or apprehending a criminal in the process of committing a crime.

Are traditional police beats obsolete?

Geography Can Provide Better Banking Services

2010-03-15T07:03:58Z

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.

Part of the problem was poor governance and a one-size-fits-all attitude toward economics at national and local scales. Banking professionals thought they could smooth over risky investments by diversifying across markets and product lines. They believed that what’s good for one community would be good everywhere else and that all that mattered was the big picture. This couldn’t work, and the financial train wreck that was 2009 proved this.

Why? Communities are diverse. Lenders and financial institutions failed to see us as individuals and how our individual differences impact each neighborhood. Every street is made up of unique transactions that can be strung together to create hot spots. The hot spots impact other areas, and like a financial cancer, they feed off each other, growing and merging.

The consequences of this? Tragedy— from a few faulty loans, we saw crumbled communities, wholesale foreclosures, and neighborhood blight. We’ve witnessed the topology of the failed financial network. Now, let’s fix it.

If banks and credit unions are to thrive in the “new normal,” they need to pay attention to information about each individual customer including lifestyle, location, and life stage. We have to begin with the most accurate information at the smallest scale possible and adjust our financial policies to this new reality. Only then will we avoid the mistakes of the past.

How should banks and financial institutions use geodemographic information to better understand their communities?

National Land Parcel Data and Surveyors

2010-02-19T11:02:39Z

Will Surveyors Heed the Call?

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.

National Land Parcel Data: A Vision for the Future is a reminder that, with new technology, surveyors have the ability to manage parcels in a GIS using survey methodologies, such as least squares adjustments, maintaining record measurements, and tying to survey control. Those willing to integrate their survey knowledge and know-how with GIS will have the capability to enter the GIS market by helping to improve the accuracy of a parcel network, consequently improving all the data in GIS.

What I hear from a lot of surveyors is that they understand the value of a national parcel database but they don’t necessarily see where they fit in with its development. I view this as a personal and professional challenge. For those of us surveyors who have integrated survey procedures and methodologies with GIS, we need to guide and convince our colleagues that adding these GIS services into their offerings is beneficial to both our profession and the GIS community. If surveyors don’t step up to the plate and provide this, someone else will.

Are surveyors prepared to engage in the opportunities that a national parcel database presents?

Social Media and the GeoWeb Deliver Participatory Planning

2010-01-19T07:01:30Z

Planning 2.0—The Next Generation of Planning Support Systems

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.

To engage citizens today, it is imperative to communicate in new ways and provide collaborative decision-making platforms. Effectively exchanging information in planning means expanding the communication footprint, moving beyond technical jargon and the resulting language boundaries. It also means holding conversations outside the traditional in-person community meetings and forums to reach across the whole community.

Social media tools and the GeoWeb answer this call and planners are already utilizing these Web 2.0 technologies to create effective planning support system (PSS) platforms that cater to planning processes and workflow needs. This emerging Planning 2.0 environment fosters the bidirectional citizenry participation that is so critical today. Open, accountable, interactive government takes us to a higher level of democracy, where citizens are empowered in new, bold ways to help shape the decision-making process and define desired future conditions. For this to happen on a broad scale, a profound transformation in the way planners conduct their business is required.

How should planners leverage Planning 2.0 to connect with their communities?

Climate Change Is a Geographic Problem

2009-12-08T02:12:37Z

Climate Change Is a Geographic Problem

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.

A GIS-based framework helps us gain a scientific understanding of earth systems at a truly global scale and leads to more thoughtful, informed decision making:

Deforestation analysis spurs successful reforestation programs and sustainable management.
Study of potential sea level rise leads to adaptive engineering projects.
Emissions assessment brings about research into alternative energy sources such as wind turbine siting and residential solar rooftop programs.

Climate change is a geographic problem, and we believe solving it takes a geographic solution.

What are the benefits of using GIS technology to advance climate change science?

Pipeline Operators Should Prepare to Abandon Stationing

2009-11-13T02:11:41Z

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.

Geographic information system (GIS) technology is now prevalent in the pipeline industry. The foundation of GIS is geography. If you operate a pipeline, it is essential to know each asset’s spatial location and identify geographic relationships. Without geographic information, it is virtually impossible to satisfy U.S. DOT operating requirements, define class locations, identify HCAs, manage pipeline integrity, conduct risk assessments, improve performance, or ensure public safety. Pipeline stationing is not a geographic location. It is a measure, similar to a house address. It seems better suited to be an attribute. Yet the industry insists on using stationing to locate assets even though pipeline companies operate geographically and maintain that it's too risky or costly to change.

Is it really too risky or costly to stop using stationing?

Smart Grid Solves Many Problems, Introduces Others

2009-10-15T08:10:30Z

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.

Along with the good of smart grid come the complex questions. These questions are new to utilities, customers, and regulators. How will we differentiate meters that are accurately reporting power failures from those that are faulty? What will happen when a major storm knocks out the electric system and the monitoring system at the same time? What will utilities do if customers don’t want to adjust their behavior, or they revolt over privacy issues? How will utilities maintain more equipment when a bulk of the workforce is retiring soon? How will utilities deal with increased maintenance and capital costs?

These are tough questions.

The first step in finding answers is to accurately assess the situation. Let’s take a look at current and future infrastructure assets—evaluate their condition and relationship to the community. We can do this by creating a complete model of the electric network in a geographic information system (GIS). With all our data tied to location and visible on one GIS-based map, we then use GIS analysis tools to plan and prioritize. Most utilities today have some form of GIS, but few really use GIS to resolve sticky strategic issues.

It is time for utilities to take stock in GIS, to make sure their data and operating picture is ready to drive the smart grid.

How ready are utilities to deal with the opportunities and challenges of smart grid?

Health 2.0: Place-Based Intelligence

2009-09-21T07:09:45Z

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!

This is a good sign for health and human service agencies everywhere, especially those that have struggled mightily for many years to build integrated information systems that support the planning and delivery of health and human services to the public. This directive also strengthens the case for better geographic accountability. Turning to a new, place-based way of thinking about spending also has the potential to vastly improve service accessibility, reduce cost and qualitative disparities, and actually help health-seeking consumers achieve desirable outcomes.

Are health and human service organizations at every level technically ready for a place-based approach to building health intelligence and actually delivering services?

Risk Managers Fail to Focus on the Details

2009-07-08T05:07:58Z

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.

Insurers have always believed that they had the tradecraft and analytic knowledge to meet these challenges. The performance of the industry as a whole since 2001 has proved them wrong. Insurers need to apply analytic tools that can differentiate market gaps and potential exposure of hot spots at a more granular level than the postal or ZIP Code level they rely on today.

You couldn't imagine navigating around a city without access to street-level detail, yet most insurers are happy to try to balance their portfolio and manage risks without the same level of understanding. GPS is a no-brainer. It gets you where you need to be, quickly and easily. For the most successful insurers, a GIS is the "business GPS"—getting them to the right destination with the least cost in the shortest time.

With GIS, insurers gain a fresh appetite for risk management and greater transparency in underwriting, helping them more accurately say no and more profitably say yes. In today's highly regulated and risk adverse economic climate, this might just be the difference between success and failure.

Does geography really help insurers understand risks better?