Everyday GIS

During the past three decades, a powerful technology has quietly changed the way people view and live in their neighborhoods, towns, and cities. This technology is GIS, and ESRI has been involved in the field since its beginnings. For nearly 30 years ESRI has made GIS available to be used by people to solve real problems.

As is the case with many technologies, most people remain unaware of GIS and its impact-an impact that is as far-ranging as it is useful-despite GIS having grown immensely in the last 15 years, despite hundreds of thousands of people now using the technology, and despite it affecting the daily lives of millions.

To prove this, let's follow your daily routine and see how GIS helps you in ways that you never suspected.

The clock radio rings at 6:00 a.m. You get up and turn on the lights.
The radio and lights are powered with household electricity. A typical electric utility company serving millions of customers uses GIS to manage its complex infrastructure consisting of tens of thousands of miles of transmission and distribution lines and hundreds of thousands of utility poles, as well as thousands of employees maintaining optimal service at hundreds of sites.
In the kitchen you pour some fresh fruit juice.

The fruit trees were grown with water provided by an irrigation district serving the agricultural community. The district serves thousands of farmers and maintains hundreds of miles of waterways. It uses GIS for engineering and operations and for powerful digital mapping.
You put on a pot of coffee.

The water the coffee is made with is provided by a water utility operating a water distribution system that consists of thousands of miles of water mains. The utility uses GIS for customer service, emergency response, water distribution, infrastructure maintenance, automated mapping, network tracing, flow analysis, and other aspects of engineering, operations, administration, and finance.

The coffee grounds get chewed up by the garbage disposal.

The water utility also maintains a water/wastewater collection system consisting of hundreds of miles of sanitary sewers and storm drains and uses GIS in tandem with its water delivery system.

You go outside, pick up the morning newspaper, and head back into your house.
The wood that was the source for the paper and for the lumber of the house was provided by wood product companies that use GIS for sound forest management practices. GIS makes easily available for analysis property boundaries, vegetation, soil analysis, roads, streams, public land survey, contours, watershed, and sensitive areas, allowing forest managers to make the best informed decisions.

The newspaper circulation department uses GIS to understand the dynamics and demographics of carrier routes, the basic unit used to report and study circulation. After finding areas where actual subscriptions were low but potential was high, those areas were targeted with subscription sales efforts, doubling the new subscriptions of the previous year.

You pile the kids into the car and stop at the gas station.

GIS technology integrates all kinds of petroleum information and applications into a common system and lets the oil companies view that information in context on a map for exploration, operation and maintenance, production, environment, land lease management, and data management.

Before the oil becomes gasoline it needs to move from the oil fields to the processing plant via pipelines. The pipeline industry uses GIS for assisting route planning and construction, operations, supply market analysis, and reporting functions.

You drop the kids off at school.

The attendance boundaries of the school were drawn using GIS. Not long ago, the school board needed to make allowances for hundreds of new kids from the new subdivisions being built in the area. A new school was required. The board used GIS to develop a system to view different possible boundaries right in their public meetings, exploring alternatives to splitting the neighborhood.

You drive to work.

The roads are safer because of GIS. The community uses GIS for managing its transportation infrastructure. GIS is used to support planning, inventory, design, construction, operations, and maintenance. More than 80 percent of the information used to manage road, rail, and port facilities have a spatial component. GIS can be used to determine the location of an event or asset and its relationship or proximity to another event or asset, which may be the critical factor leading to a decision about design, construction, or maintenance.

Your employer is the local phone company.


GIS technology assists local service telephone companies in better tracking the location and characteristics of their outside infrastructure, improving access to information when engineering new projects, improving the ability to plan for additional capacity by forecasting future growth, optimizing coverage of their mobile networks, and supporting customer service routing and dispatch operations. In the deregulated and increasingly competitive environment faced by telephone companies, this flexibility in information management and analysis is critical.
The telecom industry is also in the midst of a vast program aimed at deploying a new broadband network. This program will extend into the next decade and will increase the capacity to deliver telephone, analog and digital video, video on demand, and interactive video services. The industry adopted GIS technology to support the design, implementation, and management of the new network.

You receive a package from an overnight courier.

GIS solutions for transportation fleet and logistics management exist in the areas of routing, customer service, crew management, street and rail network management, and vehicle/depot management. Knowing where a vehicle, pickup, or delivery is at any given time leverages assets for optimum deployment and cost savings.

It's the day before the Fourth of July. You leave at noon, pick up the kids, and go to the beach.
GIS is used for the management of coastal resources including shoreline, aquatic, and terrestrial habitats and biological resources; the distribution of threatened and endangered species; and the location of the oil and gas infrastructure. With GIS and the appropriate scientific database, coastal erosion-a problem that affects both east and west coasts, the Gulf shore, and the Great Lakes-is now better understood and managed.

You enjoy a picnic lunch.

GIS helps farmers, farming cooperatives, and the crop input dealer-those fertilizer and chemical dealers who help farmers decide which products will help grow more and better crops. One of the ways GIS technology helps farmers is to project crop output by analyzing soil classifications and their resulting fertility. A GIS can produce maps that show farmers how to fertilize a given field allowing for differing levels of fertility within that same field. A GIS provides fertility data on a field that drives another tool called variable rate technology, which controls the amount of fertilizers applied to a field where it is needed.

On the way home, the kids are hungry and you stop at a fast-food restaurant.
The restaurant is at that particular location because GIS helped to define the right store mix for the location's potential customers. GIS is applied to computer-based station sales volume models that make them more accurate and adaptable to emerging or changing marketing conditions. Using regional variables from strategic sales volume models, GIS helps to direct site selection efforts and grade sites as suitable or unsuitable.

When you leave, your car is still in the parking lot, right where you left it!

Communities are showing that GIS is helping to reduce crime, providing an intelligence tool that plots and tracks all crimes. This system gives officers and investigators the ability to track crimes on a real-time basis and correlate crime statistics in a measurable fashion. The vast majority of information used in law enforcement is map based. Agencies need to display the location of incidents and be able to view incidents by categories, time, or date. Incidents can be displayed by beat, reporting district, or zone. Advanced GIS capabilities can generate incident density and contour maps that can be used to predict the probability of crimes occurring. Law enforcement agencies also use GIS in communications, operations, and records management.
It's been a long day, but you are finally home safe and sound. GIS has been there nearly every step of the way, helping make life more comfortable and safe. All through the power of geography!

Geography matters to all of us, and GIS technology is the way to gain the advantage. To learn more about how GIS affects you, visit www.gis.com.