Our world is evolving without consideration, and the result is a loss of biodiversity, energy issues, congestion in cities. But geography, if used correctly, can be used to redesign sustainable and more livable cities.
GIS is the only technology that actually integrates many different subjects using geography as its common framework.
GIS started on mainframe computers; we could get one map every five to 10 hours, and if we made a mistake, it could take longer. In the early '90s, when people started buying PCs, we migrated to desktop software.
Someone once told me be interested, not interesting - that really clicked for me.
It takes a while for executives to understand that every company is a spatial company, fundamentally: where are our assets, where are our customers, where are our sales. But when they get it, they light up and say, 'I want to get the geographic advantage.'
Web GIS allows us to take our systems of record - our traditional server and desktop technologies - and integrate them, bringing them together into a system of systems.
My parents had no money, but they had strong values that I've carried throughout my life - things like not going into debt, never borrowing money, never leveraging, paying your bills on time, keeping your agreements, selling customers the right things, treating employees right, and growing things.
Once you digitize data, you can actually analyze patterns and relationships in geographic space - relationships between certain health patterns and air or water pollution, between plants and climate, soils, landscape.
Landscape architecture is basically geodesign; it's designing geography. And yet geodesign is not only done by landscape architects, it's done by some of the world's largest corporations.
My parents owned a plants nursery. We all grew up growing things and planting things and selling things, and I also managed landscape crews.
As an organization, Esri is strong, and we're continuing to grow. We're dedicated to this. And we're excited to see what you can accomplish and to watch your work evolve.
On the landscape crew, I learned a lot from the other workers. We treated everybody equally, and we worked hard.
In the area of field apps, Collector for ArcGIS is great, but where do you go? There's a navigator app. And then what do you do when you get there? There's a workforce app. So all of these apps work hand-in-hand to support field workers.
Something like 80 per cent of business decisions have a location element. In fact, it's probably higher than that.
Bringing GIS into schools gets the kids very excited and indirectly teaches them different components of STEM education. That's been illustrated at school after school.
Executives are waking up to realize that they can do a lot better, save money, make better decisions if they optimize and start thinking geographically and have a location strategy.
There is the GIS world that is largely managing authoritative data sources, supporting geocentric workflows like fixing roads, making cities more livable through better planning, environmental management, forest management, drilling in the right location for oil, managing assets and utilities.
We have to build a better education in this country. We need to step it up.
ArcGIS Online is the complete hosted GIS in the cloud, supporting mapping and apps. Additions to this component have included smart mapping, formal metadata, better administration, and high-performance geocoding.
We tell stories with maps about global warming, biodiversity; we can design more livable cities, track the spread of epidemics. That makes a difference.
