Editorial

by Jon Fairall

^{The Way Forward}

In August I had the pleasure of attending the annual conference of the Geospatial Information Technology Association in Melbourne.

GITA's mission is to represent the IT needs of the nation's utility organisations, but a lot of people with interests outside utilities find it a congenial setting nonetheless. If you are interested in asset management - or, more broadly, the question of how to design an IT system so that it aids the mission of a large organisation, rather than wasting its money - you will find GITA informative.

This year, Victoria's chief information officer, Jane Treadwell, opened the conference. She told the audience of about 380 that spatial information is now in the 'trough of disillusionment'.

The 'trough' alludes to a phrase coined by the research organisation Gartner in a description of the innovation process.

This holds that any given innovation starts with a technology trigger. Hype about the new technology rises in exponential fashion to a peak of expectation. Reality catches up, and visibility dives into the trough of disillusionment. Thereafter, it rises slowly in linear fashion. Gartner called this process the slope of enlightenment, which terminates in nirvana, the plateau of productivity.

Treadwell places the technology trigger for GIS in the early 1980s. She speculated that the technology has been undergoing a 20 year cycle, in which hype about spatial information (we can solve all the world's ills) peaked through the millennium.

We are now at the stage where both technology and expectations have matured. It is at last possible to imagine that spatial information will become a core enabler in whole of government computing.

It won't be the whole story, she said, but it will be a part of it.

I thought this was an interesting analysis of the current situation. I'm sure that almost everyone in the audience agreed with her about the hype cycle. GIS has indeed matured. The latest releases from all the established vendors will allow spatial data to be stored and manipulated inside databases that conform to well known standards. Spatial code can be embedded in aspatial applications by non-spatial IT people working with development tools that are likewise standard. Spatial is, indeed, no longer special.

There is another sense in which GIS is mature: there is now an accepted wisdom about the way to build a spatial IT system, and about how to install an IT system in a large organisation.

But the lesson that Treadwell drew from all this might, I suggest, have caused some of the audience a little discomfort. If spatial technology is indeed mature in this special sense, we really do need to re-assess what spatial technologists do. We need to redefine their core competence.

Her presentation put a positive spin on the situation. 'If spatial technologists want to be part of this world, they will need to get very good at establishing partnerships. Spatial information can no longer work in isolation', she said.

Or, to put it another way, if spatial information's future is as a core enabler of enterprise computing, the industry's integrators face a steep learning curve.

It will no longer do to sit in a corner and complain that upper management doesn't understand. If spatial IT is to assume its logical place as the key integrator of datasets in an enterprise, its practitioners need to stand front and centre, and assert their position as system architects. That doesn't necessarily mean competing with the IT guys - it means being able to understand the overall needs of the organisation, and work out the ways that spatial data can glue the whole system together.

A cynic might remark that this is a fine expression of the triumph of optimism over experience. Partnerships are indeed the way forward. But the industry is littered with attempts at partnerships between IT departments and spatial scientists - and the results are not pretty. For every happy-ever-after story there are a dozen dysfunctional workplaces where a multi-million dollar IT system simply does not work.

There is an emerging body of experience of managing big spatial IT implementations, but it is accruing very, very slowly. The reason is not hard to find. Organisations don't admit failure. As a result, they never learn from their mistakes. People do learn from their mistakes, but it is corporate suicide to admit to a mistake in the first place, so the knowledge needs to be kept hidden.

Search as you might, you will never find an article in Position entitled 'The 20 Great Mistakes of Corporate Computing'. And of course, you will never find the sub-title of that article either: 'What I learned from them'.

There is no mechanism for sharing knowledge, and thus no mechanism for advancing it - except perhaps in some dusty academic tomb where the information can be safely sanitised and kept from the children.

Which is a pity, because the business of computing in big enterprises is almost entirely about organisational psychology and sociology. It's a fascinating study about the ways that organisations behave; what information people need; how they obtain it or provide it; how information flows around and through the organisation; and about the level of power it gives people if they withhold it, or provide it.

It is a long way from the usual training of a spatial industry professional.

Jon Fairall is the editor of Position

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(This page last modified on 26 November 2006)