Your SpotOn the IBM Cognos Edge

Has it only been a week since this great event wrapped up? As I browse through the Esri Map Book (provided in my registration kit), my third observation about the conference is pretty self-evident.

It's the maps.

I saw more maps in one place than I'd ever seen before. Maps showing public safety and policing applications (lots and lots of those). Maps depicting flood plains and flooding probability. Maps showing sophisticated and extensive integrated systems for the public sector, such as the Abu Dhabi Spatial Data Infrastructure project. There were maps showing asset management in every kind of grid imaginable, as well as maps driving urban planning. I saw amazing maps modeling and predicting weather. There was an award-winning map showing very clearly the impact of the recent economic disaster across the USA. In a somewhat more fun vein, I saw an imagery-based virtual 3D fly-over of Pasadena California, with buildings and infrastructure rendered in unbelievably crisp, realistic views.

As a long time devotee of business intelligence, I truly believe that this physical or "spatial" view into virtually any kind of data is something that everyone who works in the world of "data" should take a little time to investigate. I've seen what happens when people see their data rendered for the first time in this way. Their eyes light up. They want to show their bosses, like, right now! They're like kids in a candy store -- they want more.

Why is that? Well, we all live in the physical world. We all work and play in the physical world. For business, we all market, buy, and sell in the physical world. For the public sector, we support and service constituents that live in the physical world. And even those of us not strictly devoted to "data" are all too aware of it in today's FaceBooking, Twittering, e-mailing, texting, mobile world. The spatial view of our data makes us comfortable with it in the context of that physical world. It provides a comfortable, easily understandable and familiar frame of reference. And it opens up whole new veins of analysis and understanding. 

The next time you look at a map, imagine the data that matters to you represented on it, and how that would empower you to understand something about that data, and maybe yourself as well.

  - dk

The scale of the Esri international user conference is something to be experienced. I worked many years at a software company not unlike Esri in terms of size and revenue, and we never had anything at our annual UC's even remotely approaching the number of attendees that Esri pulls in annually.

Word is that this was the biggest and most successful Esri UC ever, in spite of the fact that many organizations face ongoing travel and budgetary restrictions.

You have to wonder how Esri manages all of this. A couple of things I noticed at the conference make me believe there's something quite different about Esri compared to most software companies, starting with the Monday plenary.

Anyone who has had the chance to listen to Jack Dangermond knows he is passionate about geography, and what it can do to influence the world around us. The plenary was rife with examples. Consider the cited GIS solution that helped coffee growers in Rwanda raise the quality of their harvest, thereby elevating prices and raising income levels broadly for thousands of people, many of whom desperately needed that boost in income. Consider also the example of GIS tools used to rid the world of devastating mine fields. There were many other examples mentioned, spanning human health, the environment, crime, and so on.

The tone of this plenary was unlike any other user conference general session I've encountered. It is software (and a software community) with huge and unmatched redeeming social value. As I spoke with the many people who dropped by the exhibition floor booth to talk to us about Geospatial Business Intelligence with IBM Cognos BI, it was really a great feeling to know that the software we use every day is about more than simply making businesses and organizations more efficient and profitable. It's great to be attached to something that does so much good around the world.

Maybe that feeling is one of the keys that helps draw such a huge crowd.

 - dk

A lot of great things were revealed at the 2011 Esri International User Conference. Esri is clearly listening to its customers, and keeps innovating!

The plenary demos were, as usual, real crowd pleasers. The arcgis.com demo, for example, was incredible -- drag and drop an excel spreadsheet onto a map, and instantly see the content rendered as points on that map. Then there were the performance enhancements in the ArcGIS server, which renders and updates drive-time polygons in real time. And the omnipresence of Esri GIS on mobile, on whatever device you like. And so on. 

Our contingent at the UC was happy to participate, but most pleased to see and hear real  focus on integrating GIS capabilities into business intelligence. After all, that's what we do.

Most significant for us was the discussion of geospatial BI in the plenary, and the inclusion in the main stage plenary of a dashboard (powered using SpotOn Vantage Maps) integrating Esri with IBM Cognos BI. This dashboard tracks and analyzes consumption of water in a smart meter pilot project, and helps determine the effectiveness of deploying such systems while also tracking costs incurred by participants in the pilot. You can see all of the plenary videos here.

We saw a lot of interest in just this kind of solution at the demonstration pod in the exhibition hall. GIS professionals are slowly but surely reaching out to integrate their enterprise GIS assets with other complementary information systems. Geospatial BI is truly coming of age.

 - dk