GIS developers are great at making maps but who cares?
I originally joined Dotted Eyes as a software engineer having spent time creating software for various other sectors. This included working for Caterpillar in the manufacturing sector, HSBC in the finance sector and the RAC in the services sector. Joining the GIS sector was a real eye opener for me.
What surprised me about this sector is the software community’s approach to software design. In other sectors customers would approach me with their specific business problem for me to provide them with the best software solution. In the GIS sector it is different – the process often stops short of giving the actual answer.
The obsession with being able to visualise data on a map in more and more clever ways never seems to reach the final step of analysing the data to give any meaningful conclusion or purpose. It reminds me of taking maths exams in schools where showing your working out is more important than actually coming up with the correct answer.
While this behavior is prevalent in the public sector, I have observed a growing frustration in the private sector at the slow rate of take up of using geographical information to help optimise efficiency and profit.
This state of affairs has hardened my resolve to hide the cleverness and the technical complexities of what we do from our customers. The fact is that customers should have little interest in the detail. I instead concentrate on providing them with what they really want – the solution. That’s why I found it really refreshing to hear Charles Kennelly, the CTO of ESRI UK at the AGI last week call upon the GIS community to ‘get over themselves’ and concentrate on making GIS more accessible. I could not agree more.
Written by Mike Talbutt, Head of Delivery at Dotted Eyes, 3rd October 2013