Our world is evolving without consideration, and the result is a loss of biodiversity, energy issues, congestion in cities. But geography, if used correctly, can be used to redesign sustainable and more livable cities.
Jack Dangermond
Someone once told me be interested, not interesting - that really clicked for me.
GIS is the only technology that actually integrates many different subjects using geography as its common framework.
Executives are waking up to realize that they can do a lot better, save money, make better decisions if they optimize and start thinking geographically and have a location strategy.
GIS, in its digital manifestation of geography, goes beyond just the science. It provides us a framework and a process for applying geography. It brings together observational science and measurement and integrates it with modeling and prediction, analysis, and interpretation so that we can understand things.
GIS is waking up the world to the power of geography, this science of integration, and has the framework for creating a better future.
On the landscape crew, I learned a lot from the other workers. We treated everybody equally, and we worked hard.
There is the GIS world that is largely managing authoritative data sources, supporting geocentric workflows like fixing roads, making cities more livable through better planning, environmental management, forest management, drilling in the right location for oil, managing assets and utilities.
Web GIS allows us to take our systems of record - our traditional server and desktop technologies - and integrate them, bringing them together into a system of systems.
In a nursery, if you don't take care of those plants, your profits get lost real quickly. You have to weed. You have to water. You have to nurture. Also, you have to take care of your employees in such a way that they do the same.
One of the things that's making ArcGIS come alive is apps. Apps are opening up the ArcGIS platform, making it available to everybody in your organization as well as to the public.
ArcGIS includes a Living Atlas of the World. It's like a large living library of geographic information.
We have to build a better education in this country. We need to step it up.
Mapping and visualization is a huge area of work and is of interest to many people. We're working on reinventing a new kind of 3D cartography to make it easier to tell stories with 3D maps.
Once you digitize data, you can actually analyze patterns and relationships in geographic space - relationships between certain health patterns and air or water pollution, between plants and climate, soils, landscape.
You have to decide who you are going to serve - stockholders or your customers.
We started with things like locating ski runs or locating a transmission line corridor or locating a new town or doing a coastal zone plan. We ourselves weren't doing the planning work, but we were doing all the mapping work for the landscape architects and planners who would subsequently incorporate the maps into their actual designs.
Something like 80 per cent of business decisions have a location element. In fact, it's probably higher than that.
My parents owned a plants nursery. We all grew up growing things and planting things and selling things, and I also managed landscape crews.
Landscape architecture is basically geodesign; it's designing geography. And yet geodesign is not only done by landscape architects, it's done by some of the world's largest corporations.
We tell stories with maps about global warming, biodiversity; we can design more livable cities, track the spread of epidemics. That makes a difference.
I don't understand why young entrepreneurs feel this pressure to take venture capital or go public. Don't get me wrong: Public companies are A-OK with me. I just think there is another way. Staying private is a lot more sane.
Google has been an amazing benefit for our business. People understand the whole world of mapping and want to do more than not get lost. They want to do spatial analytics. It's been fantastic for us.
ArcGIS Online is the complete hosted GIS in the cloud, supporting mapping and apps. Additions to this component have included smart mapping, formal metadata, better administration, and high-performance geocoding.
It takes a while for executives to understand that every company is a spatial company, fundamentally: where are our assets, where are our customers, where are our sales. But when they get it, they light up and say, 'I want to get the geographic advantage.'
GIS started on mainframe computers; we could get one map every five to 10 hours, and if we made a mistake, it could take longer. In the early '90s, when people started buying PCs, we migrated to desktop software.
My parents had no money, but they had strong values that I've carried throughout my life - things like not going into debt, never borrowing money, never leveraging, paying your bills on time, keeping your agreements, selling customers the right things, treating employees right, and growing things.
As an organization, Esri is strong, and we're continuing to grow. We're dedicated to this. And we're excited to see what you can accomplish and to watch your work evolve.
In the area of field apps, Collector for ArcGIS is great, but where do you go? There's a navigator app. And then what do you do when you get there? There's a workforce app. So all of these apps work hand-in-hand to support field workers.
Bringing GIS into schools gets the kids very excited and indirectly teaches them different components of STEM education. That's been illustrated at school after school.
I think it is widely agreed that Carl Steinitz, over the 50 years he taught at Harvard, has been one of the most important figures in influencing the theory and practice of landscape architecture and the application of computer technology to planning.
I am hunting for people who would be a good colleague or a teammate, not someone who works for me.
Web GIS provides us with a whole new window into our information through applications that are easy, 3D, and analytic. These applications are not just casual things, but reach deep into geographic knowledge and apply it.
We aren't into the consumer space because that space is largely dominated by search and advertising, and it has a consumer face to it.
We shifted our philosophy from being a computer mapping group that would support planners to the idea of building actual software that would be well engineered. Because at that time, our software was not well-engineered at all; it was basically built with project funding and for project work, largely by ourselves.
I have high hopes that GIS will become increasingly relevant for landscape architects as we make the tools easier to use for the design process of just inventory and mapping.
We have been supporting GIS in schools for more than 25 years.
One city can look at other cities relative to their city and learn something. It's a matter of sharing the patterns of what exists in one society based on landscape or cultural values versus other cities.
My parents were immigrants who started a nursery as a way to get us kids through school. I learned around the dinner table about customer service and cash flow and paying bills.
I went on to Harvard and got very interested in computers and studying the earth's landscape.
One thing that has made us so successful is that we've never taken outside investment. That means we can concentrate on what our customers want - not what the stockholders or the VCs want.
I can put tweets on a map to show who is saying what where, which could be used for marketing or social research.
Planning a garden, park, building, or city shouldn't be done in an office.
A location-aware tablet will let us use what's called geodesign to compose participatory, what-if scenarios onsite, using maps that several people can share - something we could always do with paper but that's been a challenge with digital maps in the field.
I am not that good a manager for me to be comfortable borrowing someone else's money.
When I got into college, I found what ultimately became my life's work. I couldn't sleep at night, I was so excited about it. So I'm attracted to people who play at that level. They actually want to play in their professional life.
I prefer to find craftspeople I can be colleagues with and who take an area of responsibility and run with it.
Cartography and geographic thinking are cool.
We are driven by providing technology to enterprise customers.
At Harvard, I worked for some time as a researcher in a lab for computer graphics and spatial analysis, which is one of the birthplaces for what we do.
