Benefits of GIS.pdf
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GIS provides five main benefits to organizations: 1. Cost savings through greater efficiency in operations and improved workflows. For example, Sears saw a 75% reduction in dispatch times and 12-15% less drive time for delivery routes. 2. Better decision making by understanding locations and their impacts. This helps with tasks like site selection, planning, and resource management. 3. Improved communication through maps and visualizations that provide a shared understanding across groups. 4. Better management of geographic data and records through specialized tools that support transactions, reporting, and analysis of changing information over time. 5. Managing organizations geographically by using GIS as an enterprise system to understand situations, make decisions, and communicate across
Benefits of GIS.pdf
- 1. Benefits of GIS • GIS benefits organizations of all sizes and in almost every industry. • There is a growing interest in and awareness of the economic and strategic value of GIS, in part because of more standards-based technology and greater awareness of the benefits demonstrated by GIS users. • The number of GIS enterprise solutions and IT strategies that include GIS are growing rapidly. The benefits of GIS generally fall into five basic categories:
- 2. 1.Cost savings resulting from greater efficiency. These are associated either with carrying out the mission (i.e., labour savings from automating or improving a workflow) or improvements in the mission itself. A good case for both of these is Sears, which implemented GIS in its logistics operations and has seen dramatic improvements. Sears considerably reduced the time it takes for dispatchers to create routes for their home delivery trucks (by about 75%). It also benefited enormously in reducing the costs of carrying out the mission (i.e., 12%-15% less drive time by optimizing routes). Sears also improved customer service, reduced the number of return visits to the same site, and scheduled appointments more efficiently.
- 3. 2. Better decision making. This typically has to do with making better decisions about location. Common examples include real estate site selection, route/corridor selection, zoning, planning, conservation, natural resource extraction, etc. People are beginning to realize that making the correct decision about a location is strategic to the success of an organization.
- 4. 3. Improved communication GIS-based maps and visualizations greatly assist in understanding situations and story telling. They are a new language that improves communication between different teams, departments, disciplines, professional fields, organizations, and the public.
- 5. 4. Better geographic information record keeping. Many organizations have a primary responsibility of maintaining authoritative records about the status and change of geography (geographic accounting). Cultural geography examples are zoning, population census, land ownership, and administrative boundaries. Physical geography examples include forest inventories, biological inventories, environmental measurements, water flows, and a whole host of geographic accountings. GIS provides a strong framework for managing these types of systems with full transaction support and reporting tools. These systems are conceptually similar to other information systems in that they deal with data management and transactions, as well as standardized reporting (e.g., maps) of changing information. However, they are fundamentally different because of the unique data models and hundreds of specialized tools used in supporting GIS applications and workflows.
- 6. 5. Managing geographically. In government and many large corporations, GIS is becoming essential to understand what is going on. Senior administrators and executives at the highest levels of government use GIS information products to communicate. These products provide a visual framework for conceptualizing, understanding, and prescribing action. Examples include briefings about various geographic patterns and relationships including land use, crime, the environment, and defence/security situations. GIS is increasingly being implemented as enterprise information systems. This goes far beyond simply spatially enabling business tables in a DBMS. Geography is emerging as a new way to organize and manage organizations. Just like enterprise-wide financial systems transformed the way organizations were managed in the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, GIS is transforming the way that organizations manage their assets, serve their customers/citizens, make decisions, and communicate. Examples in the private sector include most utilities, forestry and oil companies, and most commercial/retail businesses. Their assets and resources are now being maintained as an enterprise information system to support day-to-day work management tasks and provide a broader context for assets and resource management.