GIS a New Tool for Businesses

Today the 17th of November is world Geographic Information Systems (GIS) day. A day set aside by users, developers and vendors to showcase to the world real-world application of GIS. GIS day is held each year across the globe in the third week of November, on the Wednesday during Geography Awareness Week. A geographic literacy initiative, lead by the National Geographic Society of America. The aim is to promote awareness about GIS, the value GIS products and services. As a user this is the contribution to occasion the day.

GIS is a management information technology tool that helps you to make decisions base on Geography. The field GIS is concerned with the description, explanation, and prediction of patterns and processes at geographic scales. GIS is a science, a technology, a discipline, and an applied problem solving methodology. The great appeal of GIS stems from their ability to integrate large quantities of information about the environment and to provide a powerful repertoire of analytical tools to explore this data. It reveals answers to problems in ways that spreadsheet and databases cannot do.

If Geography doesn’t matter go and ask your first Economics Teacher. I bet you remember him/her stating factors necessary for locating your business. Location decisions have been with us since time immemorial. Cast your mind back to where our forefathers first settled, it was basically near a natural resource, like water, fertile land, game or against some form of threat thus living in caves, hilltop etc. Today location decisions are even more intense with stiff competition for prime lands round the country.

Making decisions based on geography is basic to human thinking. Where shall we go, how far away, and what shall we do when we get there are applied to the simple event of going to the store or to the major event of flying an airplane to take photo shots of the expansion of Accra, as in remote sensing. By understanding geography and people's relationship to location, we can make informed decisions about the way we live on our planet.

Well in the current world of information technology GIS has come to assist we hurdle the location discourse and much more. GIS is broadly understood to handle large amount of data, processing, retrieval and display of information with spatial dimension. GIS presents information in the form of maps and feature symbols, and it is integrated with databases containing attribute data on the feature. Looking at a map gives information on where things are, what they are, and how they are related. Dr John Snow the father of modern epidemiology used GIS techniques in 1854 to map out the source of an outbreak of a cholera epidemic to a contaminated water pump on Broad Street in London.

The components of GIS are synonymous to or integrated into IT systems; hardware, software, data, procedures, people and networking. It comprises information systems like Cartographic Display System, Map Digitising System, Database Management System, Geographic Analysis System, Image Processing System, and Statistical Analysis System.

GIS is thought to have been started concurrently in Europe, Canada, America and Australia around the 1960s. But the baseline point is attributed to the Canadian Geographic Information System setup to collect data for the Canada Land Inventory. Now GIS applications have gone beyond surveying and land and affording businesses new tools to understand the earth in more ways than before. The main advantages of GIS are its flexibility, speed, accuracy, cost effectiveness, and capability to handle large volumes of spatial and non spatial data. And now, a preferred choice of spatial decision support system for leading businesses across the world is GIS.

Applications of GIS cut across industry domains from Agriculture to Zoology. It is providing businesses with solutions related to: Customer Analysis, Market Analysis, Site Selection, Risk Analysis, Territory Management, Facility/Property/Asset Management, Supply Chain Management, and Logistics. Already the Mining, Telecoms and Surveying sectors in Ghana are in the lead taking advantage of the benefits GIS. What are you waiting for?

An often-cited statistic in literature is that 80% of business data has a geographical element, and hence geographical information systems (GIS) are playing an increasingly important role in any area of business i.e. houses/office location or addresses. On any given day, more than two million people around the world use GIS to improve the way their organization see customers (ESRI). The growth rate of the GIS market top over 10% year on year.

You may know who your customers are but how about where they are? It is often said ‘where you live is who you are’. If the marketing mix of the 4Ps includes in the least a Place then you already are on board the GIS revolution and have power to do more. From the simple operation of; locating the highest point for sitting a mast and determining the network coverage, to private land titling as loan guarantee using Global Position System (GPS), mapping hotspots of crime as in security and spreading vulnerability risk in insurance, the GIS revolution is on.

Further on GIS can take advantage spatial factors to improve response times, optimize movement of goods and services, market more effectively, and gain enhanced knowledge of routing, siting, and territories. GIS can be linked to internet to support virtual application. GIS helps you to map, analyse, visualize and understand data in new ways to support your decision making process for your organisation. A picture they say is worth a thousand words.

Francis Ocansey

GIS User

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