Achieving Business Success with GIS – Bruce Douglas

Written at a practical level, suited to the business audience, this exceptional book explores the business environment of making GIS successful. It applies academic rigor to practical and commercial implementation issues and offers viewpoints from all parties involved in GIS implementation. Achieving Business Success with GIS provides tangible advice ranging from technical and financial to organizational and commercial. It is unique in that it does not stop short of providing, without hype or embellishment, practical advice and real examples regarding the total cost of ownership of a project or finance and return investment of GIS products. Achieving Business Success with GIS highlights that the use of GIS technology needs to be focused on the business issues, not the technology. The book begins by describing the use of GIS in a global context within a business environment as the background to outlining the need for organizations to have a strategy for their GIS. The book then goes on to explore the elements of a GIS strategy and explains issues which are relevant for such approaches and how to go about developing it. In the closing chapters of this book, the process of specifying and tendering for a GIS are discussed to ensure that the focus of the reader remains on the business issues of the organization. This is followed by examples of the best and worst Geographic Information Systems including a discussion on Google Earth and Web 2.0. The combination of the statistics from the GIS / Spatial surveys and the author’s consulting experiences make this book an invaluable resource for GIS managers in government (federal, state and local) and utilities, organisations using GIS, and students and lecturers in this field.