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How many times have you heard peo­ple say, “it’s a per­son­nel, organ­i­sa­tional or struc­tural prob­lem” as they began to run into a wall in terms of advanc­ing a project more quickly or encoun­tered resis­tance, some­times even fail­ure? Many of us have expe­ri­enced this, and, the reac­tions can also be dif­fer­ent with some walk­ing away, oth­ers hard­en­ing their posi­tion while oth­ers scratch their head and set about to come at the con­flict using an alter­nate approach.

What is dri­ving this col­umn this week is a grow­ing real­i­sa­tion that, per­haps, our geot­ech­nolo­gies and con­cep­tual knowl­edge have reached a new plateau and may be search­ing for a new chal­lenge, a new approach and the next foot­steps forward.

A clas­sic exam­ple of this is the recent ter­ror­ist scare where a sin­gle indi­vid­ual man­aged to pass through layer after layer of tech­nol­ogy. The data was there. The dots did not con­nect though for other rea­sons — organ­i­sa­tional and struc­tural related.

Ear­lier this year Christo­pher Tucker in an arti­cle in FP enti­tled ‘Unfa­mil­iar Ground’ wrote about the need for up-to-date dig­i­tal ter­rain mod­els (DTM) for Afghanistan. His point was clear, with­out accu­rate ter­rain topog­ra­phy mod­els, lives were being endan­gered. With the num­ber of satel­lites cir­cling the planet, the huge num­ber of UAV’s fly­ing around Afghanistan, even the most unaware would right­fully ask, “why is a DTM not available?”

Geoff Zeiss, CTO at Autodesk is prob­a­bly one of the most trav­elled peo­ple I am aware of.  I’ll bet he has enough air miles to take a space ship to the moon and return — free. But he also writes con­tin­u­ally on his blog ‘Between the Poles’ about the stack­ing of geospa­tial infor­ma­tion into silos, sep­a­rated struc­tural parts of organ­i­sa­tions that don’t or can’t seem to share information.

These are just a few exam­ples where the tech­nol­ogy is not nec­es­sar­ily fail­ing, but organ­i­sa­tions are clearly not adjust­ing, adapt­ing, improv­ing — or what­ever the word is — to reach a new level of func­tion­ing. I will say it is not all, but quite a few.

That needs to change.

We need to under­stand this phe­nom­e­non. It is a result of the tech­nolo­gies and our knowl­edge matur­ing over the last few decades, but not plac­ing sim­i­lar energy into adapt­ing agen­cies and busi­ness mod­els to use the infor­ma­tion they gen­er­ate. Again, not all, but quite a few.

It is about more than sim­ply access­ing data.  It is about know­ing what the data means, its sig­nif­i­cance and use­ful­ness. These go directly to qual­ity issues and — fit-for-purpose.

My col­league Matt Ball has been writ­ing recently on the topic of Geo­De­sign as he is attend­ing that event in the U.S. ESRI has of course pub­lished about the sub­ject of Geo­De­sign.  I have few doubts that Geo­De­sign could not have been dis­cussed in the form it is, before this time, since the tech­nol­ogy was not ready, nor indi­vid­ual aware­ness — the tim­ing is cor­rect for it’s pur­suit — which as far as I can deci­pher, will exceed our cur­rent per­cep­tions on what a geo­graphic infor­ma­tion sys­tem (GIS) is.

The cur­rent trends toward greater uptake of soft­ware as a ser­vice (SaaS) are help­ing to spread tech­no­log­i­cal func­tion­ing and capa­bil­i­ties to a wider num­ber of peo­ple. This is help­ing them to encounter dif­fi­cult prob­lems that pre­vi­ously were out­side of their ‘solu­tion reach’ for tech­nol­ogy reasons.

In a sense, one has to won­der if through the empow­er­ment of wider num­bers of peo­ple using SaaS approaches, are organ­i­sa­tiona and struc­tural admin­is­tra­tive issues increas­ing in pace, war­rant­ing even more atten­tion as they rise up the crit­i­cal list?

Hav­ing had the oppor­tu­nity to man­age multi-discplinary research projects in a large research Uni­ver­sity, my obser­va­tion was that con­verged goals and inte­grat­ing multi-disciplinary goals is best achieved by help­ing peo­ple to per­form at their best individually.I doubt this is a rev­o­lu­tion­ary obser­va­tion, just com­mon sense.

The cur­rent state of spa­tial tech­nolo­gies includ­ing GIS, remote sens­ing, GPS , sur­vey­ing and oth­ers is sim­ply remarkable.

How­ever, the case be made that ‘sur­vey­ors ought not hang only with sur­vey­ors’ and ‘remote sens­ing spe­cial­ists should work with GIS” and ‘GPS peo­ple should con­sider to work with design,’ for example.

The active engage­ment of uncom­fort­able posi­tions may be the way for­ward. What do you think? Can you see the moun­tains through the forest?

More Infor­ma­tion

Putting Europe high on the global map of sci­ence and tech­nol­ogy: Com­mis­sion advo­cates new inter­na­tional strat­egy

Tran­scul­tural Media Reper­toires and Com­mu­nity Per­cep­tions in Europe

Con­gres­sional Hear­ing High­lights Need for “Bold, Deci­sive Action” to Improve Fed­eral Geospa­tial Coor­di­na­tion

Sci­en­tists at cli­mate talks say major changes to the nitro­gen cycle can­not be ignored