Read the article that was published in this month's edition of GIS Professional.

The article discusses how GIS as a Service can transform the way organisations operate by allowing us to monitor and control our own use of scarce resources.

I recently received a free electricity smart meter from my supplier - I installed it in a few seconds and now regularly go online to upload my data on usage. Through the web portal I can now easily monitor and review how much electricity I’m using, analyse patterns and trends, compare with similar properties and identify when and how to reduce my energy consumption and make more cost effective use.

So what’s all this got to do with GIS? Well, with public services struggling to find efficiencies and cut costs and the private sector seeking to improve competitiveness and market share, it’s clear that the use of GIS is more relevant than ever before. The use of spatial information empowers organisations, communities and customers to improve decisions and increase collaboration, simplifying relationship management and enhance co-ordination with a direct influence on saving costs and increasing efficiency.

However, while potential demand is high and will continue to accelerate, has the supply of GIS services become more affordable, more accessible and as easy for customers to consume as using an energy smart meter or are we still too focused on the back office instead?

Evolution

In the past, traditional barriers associated with GIS implementation, such as long lead times, high costs and the technical complexities and risks involved, prevented many customers from adopting GIS or realising the potential business benefits on offer.

The days when GIS was seen as a specialist, back-office domain requiring significant investment in expert staff, complex technologies and costly data are rapidly disappearing. Through a combination of readily available, high speed internet access, convergence between GIS and mainstream IT technologies, the increased use of Open Source technologies, more open or free data, the widespread availability of consumer GIS (Google Maps, Bing etc.) and, most recently, the opportunities presented by the Cloud, the focus has switched to the ready access, integration and more innovative use of geographic data and services.

GIS as a Service

There is a growing swell of interest towards the provision of hosted, managed GIS services that reduce or remove the requirement to invest in a local spatial data infrastructure and the related costs and dependencies of building, operating, managing and maintaining hardware or operating system and software components at multiple sites. Customers can simply access GIS data and functionally rich application services over the internet using a standard web browser whenever and wherever they need it, without having to think about how it got there.

Online, on demand solutions are becoming highly scalable and provide customers with the flexibility to increase or decrease users and data volumes in line with demand without the need to purchase IT capacity or expensive software licences they may not need.

Further, the costs can be easily managed with minimal initial outlay and known revenue costs associated with the subscription payment models now adopted by most suppliers. It is estimated that the total cost of ownership for a typical local authority could reduce by up to 60% over 5 years compared to building and maintaining a traditional GIS installation and for SME’s the entry cost and lead time to introducing GIS can equally be dramatically reduced.

Customer Value

In parallel with this technical evolution, GIS customers are demanding more for less, with their expectations on service, systems and quality higher than ever. To meet the expectations of GIS customers in the future means a transformation, not just in the way the technologies and solutions are delivered, but also in the way we address customer value.

So what are the differentiators that the customer will focus on when making an informed choice on GIS services in the future?

• Cost: will continue to be a key element of the customer value chain. We are just seeing the start of what will be rapidly growing competition around the delivery of hosted geographic data services. Yet, as a result of increased competition, we are already witnessing significant changes in pricing models and reduced charges that will provide customers with real opportunities to save costs and increase internal efficiencies. How long before we see a “gocompare GIS” or “uSwitchGIS” offering, with the customer choosing a solution and supplier as easily as you currently choose an insurance provider?

• Convenience: customers need GIS to be convenient to access and use, whether in the office, at home or on the move, with consistent and ready access to the data and functions that they need when they want.

• Customer Service: customers of the future will be very different to those of the past – it’s much less about working with technically informed users and much more about making GIS easy for non specialists to access, use, integrate, share and publish with the confidence of a reliable, predictable, managed service. Transparency in service performance and demonstrating the added value contributed by GIS to business-wide strategic targets, customer engagement and top line impact will be what really matters to customers of the future.

• Content: the importance of reliable, current, secure and accurate data will continue to be strengthened by virtue of making the access and sharing of geographic information easy. The move to hosted data services for a growing range of third party mapping datasets will mean that customers can focus on improving the management and linking of their own business data with geographic data to provide real spatial intelligence. Expectations are growing that the management, update and integration of data content will take place entirely as an online self-service. Customers will increasingly expect to use GIS as an information sharing hub that easily links content within and between organisations.

• Context: services need to be customer-centric, enabling differentiation between users, groups and roles, making it easy for customers to present GIS online in a way that meets a range of individual, organisational, partner and customer preferences. Solutions need to be flexible and capable of easy integration within an organisation and its key business systems with minimal reliance on technical experts. Publishing and sharing geographic information needs to be context-sensitive, with general purpose web GIS solutions making way for solutions that are easily configured to provide different stakeholders or different application interests with only the data and functions they need.

Location Centre

With this rapidly changing backdrop in mind, Forth Valley GIS recently launched Location Centre. Location Centre provides GIS as a Service, combining the infrastructure, data and software as an online service that makes powerful GIS capabilities easy to access and use, whenever and wherever a customer needs it.

Location Centre is built upon an integrated service framework that provides customers with the full range of on demand GIS capabilities to meet business needs. This includes :

• a functionally rich web GIS browser that also incorporates context-sensitive business applications ensuring that customers only gain access to the tools and functions they need; with the extensive user and role management functions available, this means the browser can be easily deployed into multi-agency, multiple stakeholder initiatives and directly enable online collaboration and information sharing with guaranteed data security and integrity;
• web services to stream industry INSPIRE/OGC standard and customized spatial data services for use in other business systems or web applications and the functions to easily consume and view web services from other providers;
• internet articles – a powerful feature that lets customers create simple or complex map viewers or spatial reporting tools that bind the relevant data and services and are published as a single URL. Customers can then easily embed context sensitive web mapping and spatial tools into their websites and web applications, including any content management systems in use, by simply linking via the URL. This capability provides for the rapid deployment of context-sensitive spatial intelligence without the need for any GIS or

Location Centre is delivered from a “private Cloud”. This provides customers with control on where the data is stored, how it is managed and what data is shared, while at the same time providing the benefits of flexibility, scalability and cost savings promised by the Cloud. The whole framework is built on Open Source technologies – partly to limit the costs passed on to end users and partly to exploit the opportunities for rapid development and collaboration with a global development community.

Challenges

So what are some of the challenges ahead? 

For GIS suppliers, the challenge is the speed and agility with which they transform their traditional delivery channels and associated licencing and pricing models as well as how to achieve successful differentiation in a market that is going to become very crowded. The benefits of an “as Service” model is that solutions can be continually enhanced and a close eye needs to be kept on developments in other IT and business sectors where on demand services and the focus on customer value are already well developed.

For customers, the move away from “doing” GIS in an organisation to “using” GIS is a significant cultural shift, especially in the public sector where there is a long tradition of building and maintaining expensive GIS infrastructures. The prize is a big one though as moving to a GIS as a Service world for the public sector will lead to a much needed rationalisation of the existing effort and specialist GIS resources can then focus on how to make better use of GIS to improve services.

Conclusion

GIS as a Service will completely transform the way organisations operate. For those who already have GIS, it will streamline and simplify the infrastructure, increase access, reduce costs and increase efficiency. For those that don’t, it provides a low-cost, low-risk approach to implementation that breaks down the traditional barriers to entry and levels the opportunities across all sizes of organisations. Either way, the focus shifts to using GIS as a smart technology to deliver real business benefits and achieving customer value without.