Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

James B. Pick is Professor of Business at the University of Redlands, California, where he served as Chair of the Department of Management and Business and the School of Business School Faculty Assembly. He holds a BA from Northwestern University and PhD from University of California, Irvine. He has published?ten books, including Mexico Megacity, Exploring the Urban Community: A GIS Approach, and Geographic Information Systems in Business, and over 100 peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, and papers. He has received numerous grants and awards, including a Fulbright Senior Scholar Award for Mexico, and faculty awards for outstanding research and teaching.

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Exploit the advantages of Geographic Information Systems in your business

Once the domain of cartographers and other specialists, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are increasingly being employed by the business community. Location-based services, supply chain management, management of field-distributed equipment, geographical marketing and promotion, and the spatial web are some of the current business applications that make use of GIS principles.

Written specifically for the businessperson, Geo-Business: GIS in the Digital Organization is the first book to provide comprehensive coverage of GIS applications in the business and organizational environment. Going beyond a strictly geographical focus, this book sets GIS in the context of business information systems and other business sub-disciplines such as logistics, marketing, finance, and strategic management. It presents from an organizational?perspective the advantages of spatially enabling existing enterprise systems and illustrates how GIS is applied in the real world through rigorous case study analyses of twenty companies, including Baystate Health, Chico's, Kaiser Permanente, Lamar Advertising Company, Rand McNally, Southern Company, Sears Roebuck, and Sperry Van Ness.

In this book, you'll find out:

• What GIS is and how it can be integrated into your organization's existing information infrastructure

• How GIS is currently making businesses better, and how you can apply the same techniques to your industry or organization

• The expanding roles of GIS and spatial technologies in the web and mobile environments

• The ethical, legal, and security issues of spatial technologies

• How to conduct a cost / benefit and ROI analyses for GIS

Grounded in the real world of business and IT, Geo-Business will show you how spatially enabling your IT systems can give you a unique advantage to beat your competitors in the market, win and retain customers, grow your business, make better decisions, develop new products and services, and optimize your workflow.

Aus dem Klappentext

Exploit the advantages of Geographic Information Systems in your business

Once the domain of cartographers and other specialists, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are increasingly being employed by the business community. Location-based services, supply chain management, management of field-distributed equipment, geographical marketing and promotion, and the spatial web are some of the current business applications that make use of GIS principles.

Written specifically for the businessperson, Geo-Business: GIS in the Digital Organization is the first book to provide comprehensive coverage of GIS applications in the business and organizational environment. Going beyond a strictly geographical focus, this book sets GIS in the context of business information systems and other business sub-disciplines such as logistics, marketing, finance, and strategic management. It presents from an organizational?perspective the advantages of spatially enabling existing enterprise systems and illustrates how GIS is applied in the real world through rigorous case study analyses of twenty companies, including Baystate Health, Chico's, Kaiser Permanente, Lamar Advertising Company, Rand McNally, Southern Company, Sears Roebuck, and Sperry Van Ness.

In this book, you'll find out:

• What GIS is and how it can be integrated into your organization's existing information infrastructure

• How GIS is currently making businesses better, and how you can apply the same techniques to your industry or organization

• The expanding roles of GIS and spatial technologies in the web and mobile environments

• The ethical, legal, and security issues of spatial technologies

• How to conduct a cost / benefit and ROI analyses for GIS

Grounded in the real world of business and IT, Geo-Business will show you how spatially enabling your IT systems can give you a unique advantage to beat your competitors in the market, win and retain customers, grow your business, make better decisions, develop new products and services, and optimize your workflow.

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Geo-Business

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

BUSINESS IN THE DIGITAL ECONOMY

Spatial technologies and GIS are impacting the productivity of business and economies. As information technologies have become more pervasive, interactive, mobile, internet-based, and diffused throughout the enterprise, likewise spatial technologies have done so. Information technologies became prevalent for mainframes in the late 1950s and early 1960s, while GIS only appeared commercially in the late 1960s and became widespread in government in the late 1970s. This lag means that information technologies became well established in organizations about fifteen years earlier than GIS. In the business world, the lag is greater because GIS was first adopted by governments, remained largely a public-sector feature for two decades, and only became widespread in businesses in the 1990s.

The reasons that GIS has not caught on until recently in the business sector include its high cost and lack of perceived benefits. Spatial datasets are larger than corresponding non-spatial ones. Often spatial data analysis requires more processing power than similar non-spatial analysis. Thus, computing capacity parameters took longer to provide enough speed and power to adequately support spatial analysis and its applications. Second, business people have had less overall knowledge of spatial principles and applications than their government counterparts. Until recently, exposure to spatial software in industry was limited and fairly expensive. Training is sometimes difficult for the average business person to obtain. Software training is provided by GIS software vendor firms and many community colleges. An example is the GIS Education at City College of San Franciso (CCSF, 2007). Universities have not until recently emphasized the business side of spatial technologies. GIS is a prevalent tool in schools of planning and public administration, but is only beginning to take hold in business schools (Pick, 2004). Generally, universities have not understood what is needed to educate and train the geospatial workforce (Marble, 2006). Third, business top management leadership in the 1990s infrequently recognized the importance of spatial dimensions. Today more business leaders do recognize it. As seen in cases in the book, some top leaders in companies that heavily utilize GIS/Spatial technologies do recognize its significance strategically, while others do not.

The Rise in the Internet Platform for GIS

Another set of trends that has stimulated spatial and GIS applications is the rise of the internet, web, and e-commerce applications. The following recap of the development of the internet, underscores how recently web-based GIS has been possible and how it serves as a driver for GIS.

Although the application of the internet started in 1969 at the U.S. Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the main protocol of TCP/IP was not developed until 1974 and only came into research and academic use at leading centers in the late 1970s. TCP/IP (transmission control protocol/internet protocol) is the protocol that controls internet communications between computers. The management of the internet shifted from Department of Defense (DOD) to the National Science Foundation in 1987 and to international commercial organizations in 1995. At that point, the backbone internet traffic was taken over by commercial telecommunications carriers worldwide such as MCI Inc., AT&T, Sprint, and Nippon Telephone Company. As seen in Table 1.1, the number of internet hosts worldwide increased steadily from the mid 1980s to 2005 (The Internet Society, 2006). An internet host is any computer system connected to the internet from a full- or part-time, direct or dial-up connection (more specifically, a host is any computer with an IP address). Since internet hosts only exceeded 100 million in 2000, this table underscores why widespread GIS and spatial applications on the internet are recent.

The World Wide Web (WWW) was originated in 1989 at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics by Tim Berners-Lee. It allowed a user to jump around the internet by links attached to text and imagery. The first browser, Mosaic, was invented in 1993 at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at University of Illinois. This browser and others that followed such as Microsoft Explorer (1995) led to standard and user-friendly interfaces that made the web navigation much easier.

Businesses had been able to use the internet to conduct some business transactions in the 1980s through Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), but the control of the interchanges was not user-friendly, so it was mostly specialists in IT departments who developed, operated, and utilized EDI. With the advent of the WWW, a new form of business exchange became available, electronic commerce. Electronic commerce is the conduct of commercial transactions on a widespread basis through internet-based exchanges, mostly WWW-based. It grew in the early to mid 1990s and today is estimated to underlie about 5 percent of the U.S. economy, a proportion that is growing. E-commerce can be business-to-consumer (B2C) or business-to-business (B2B). Business-to-consumer e-commerce consists of business transactions and exchanges between a customer and the business; for instance, if a consumer on the web purchases a laptop computer from Dell, or books from Amazon. Business-to-business involves transactions and exchanges between two or more businesses. An example is a B2B website for chemical companies to sell and purchase chemical products with other chemical firms. Often B2B applications provide the basis for market transactions.

The expansion of e-commerce in the United States has been rapid and continues. For instance, e-commerce as a percentage of U.S. retail sales grew steadily from 0.91 percent in 2000 to 2.37 percent for year 2005 (U.S. Census, 2006). E-commerce trends relate to GIS applications, since spatial interfaces are beginning to be involved. This can be through B2C user interfaces with spatial features, marketing of e-commerce, and delivery of goods. For instance, many Google Earth mash-ups, i.e. third party products based on Google code, allow customers to search for business products and services, and conduct online business transactions. The Sperry Van Ness case at the end of the chapter supports spatial features on the web so brokers and their customers can more quickly research, market, and close commercial real estate sales transactions.

Since spatial systems tend to lag information systems (IS) somewhat, web-based spatial applications have only appeared heavily since 2000. Today the shift in spatial applications is steadily towards the web and internet (Sonnen et al., 2004; Sonnen, 2006; Daratech, 2004). Users find the internet platform appealing, easy, and flexible between devices. However, the web protocols and the designs, servers, and software to support these spatial applications are still in development. For instance, the leading spatial web protocols such as GML (Geography Markup Language),WFS (Web Feature Services), and WMS (Web Map Service) are available through a leading standards body, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), but are not yet fully accepted industry standards.

E-commerce applications with spatial components became evident in the Dot.Com boom of the late 1990s with the...