Three Ways to Make GIS as Powerful as Possible

Jim Berry, a gedeveloper advocate at Esri, publishes an article at Smart Cities Dive that offers advice on how cities can better deploy GIS technology.

"There’s a revolution in civic innovation taking place in most major cities around the world, writes Berry, "cities are realizing the need to provide easy access to open spatial data and interactive map apps for partner agencies and local governments."

Beyond making the case for why cities should embrace this revolution (e.g., open data frees up workers and provides data and resources within their daily workflows), Berry lists three steps toward making the most of open data and spatial visualization tools. The first step is to make sense of the data (with easy-to-read maps). The second step is to activate the Internet of Things. Berry sites the Virginia Beach StormSense Project as an example of this approach. The third step is to enable collaboration.

Much more detail is included on each of these approaches in the article.