Are GIS People and BI Folks Different Species?
Posted by Chris Ovens on Mon, Aug 11, 2008
I'm thinking they are. I had the opportunity to spend a couple of days at the 2008 ESRI International User Conference down in San Diego.
Being a veteran BI guy, I'm fairly familiar with the Business Intelligence circuit; TDWI, Gartner, Computer World, and several Cognos Forums (on both sides of the stage). I've found that the attitudes are generally fairly upbeat and positive. Attendees are proponents of BI solutions, the value of these solutions, and the importance of BI in organizations as a foundation for performance management. The BI folks - if you can characterize this broadly, which might be a stretch - are also realists, and will speak of opportunities just out of their solutions reach. I have also seen beaten down individuals who are suffering due to the unfulfilled promise of BI expectations.
Then I went to San Diego...
I was absolutely stunned at the passion attendees displayed for GIS applications; and the eagerness to push the envelope with organizations' GIS deployments. I get that every data point has a location, but holy cow! Truth be told, there was some spectacularly stunning displays of technology.
So is the GIS Analyst some part of a fanatical cult? Let's look for clues... Attendees in San Diego: 14,500. Want to see where they came from? Check the map. Click around a bit if you want. Although ESRI is a private company, my understanding is that it was roughly in the same revenue ballpark as Cognos. ESRI Conference attendees outnumbered this year's Forum attendees by a factor of nearly 4! This blew me away.
One last tidbit; I was sitting in on a demo. The presenter was speaking about a multi-dimentional GIS connector, and proceeded to poll the audience on their familiarity with OLAP. I looked around the room and noticed there was only one hand up - mine... Everybody was looking at me like I was the freak! If they only knew...