Land surveyors have long promoted the hiring of a land surveyor prior to purchasing property. It provides buyers with the assurance that what they are paying for is what they are getting. It supports the transaction legally. Geographic Information Systems are in many organizations today. They are used as strategic business tools that enable up-to-date asset management, transaction of business and support enterprise operations. Wouldn’t you want to ‘look under the hood’ of a proposed purchase to inspect things more closely? Knowing the status of a GIS within an organization says a lot about the business.
Land surveyors have long promoted the hiring of a land surveyor prior to purchasing property. It provides buyers with the assurance that what they are paying for is what they are getting. It supports the transaction legally. Geographic Information Systems are in many organizations today. They are used as strategic business tools that enable up-to-date asset management, transaction of business and support enterprise operations. Wouldn’t you want to ‘look under the hood’ of a proposed purchase to inspect things more closely? Knowing the status of a GIS within an organization says a lot about the business.
Today the cost of implementing a GIS within a business is rapidly dropping as cloud services support applications, attracting many users who previously neither wanted the expense of operating their own GIS or lacked the resources to do so. But not all GIS are in the cloud, and many organisations continue to operate extensive, successful and dynamic GIS internally.
Either way, these businesses have decided to use GIS tools because they offer a range of advantages to their business models, supporting operations that either result in greater efficiency, provide higher forms of integration and automation or because they lead to many new opportunities.
Mobility is a driving factor for many businesses involved in spatial data applications. This includes asset management involving field computing tools and technologies, networked computing across regions and continents as well as participants both external and internal to many work flows.
In short, it does not take long to understand that GIS are integral components to any geospatial venture and that their integrative nature is integral to the functioning of many organisations today. Simple database management alone is not enough when it comes to spatial data toolsets and spatial applications. Many organisations want to couple the unique spatial aspects of their data operations to software designed for particular applications. CAD-based users want improved building information management (BIM), others want more modeling, some seek improved simulations and yet others are looking to integrate time and 3D into their work flows.
Correspondingly, GIS tools provide better than a reasonable approach for gauging the effectiveness of an organisation. Through observation of an enterprise operation based on GIS, efficiency and effectiveness are essentially revealed – one does not need to install anything to understand what and organisation is about, provided they have free access to the GIS…
During most transactions involving merger or acquisition, due diligence is performed and most people will understand or have experienced this process.
The kind of ‘GIS Due Diligence’ I am talking about here refers to something in addition to that, but is designed to ascertain very specific understanding of businesses prior to acquisition, through tracking and trying out the processes underlying the proposed transaction.
It is one thing to have assets and to have financial tools and knowledge, but it is another thing to understand the connection of propose – or – to even try out existing systems to see what their potential might be. Knowing the later is a key decision making piece of information, and it involved other resources being linked to and integrated with proposed acquisition resources.
Just as surveyors can help land buyers with purchases of land. GIS professionals operating with highly advanced GIS today can decipher linkages and integrative boundaries within IT systems that expose opportunity – or risk.
