Fast Four ICYMI—Taming the Unknown Unknowns

In business, the term “unknown unknowns” usually means risks that can’t be predicted. But sometimes surprise events work in a company’s favor – if it has built the right foundation.

A recent WhereNext webcast brought together thought leaders from AECOM, Citizens Bank, and Prologis to discuss building effective geospatial strategies. Each panelist has seen the benefits of approaching a geographic information system (GIS) with clear vision and strategy.

In the three-minute clip below, Andy Wohlsperger of AECOM explains how his company turned uncertainty into an advantage. His fellow panelists add practical advice on creating long-term value and winning executive buy-in. It’s worth watching for any GIS analyst, manager, or executive who works with location data or makes decisions based on it.

Chris Chiappinelli, WhereNext:  I can imagine some of our audience members saying, “You know, we implemented GIS technology. We’re using it to address this particular business challenge. What more is there? Why do I need to think about strategy?” John, what would you say to them?

John Sauvageau, Citizens Financial: Implementing GIS technology, that’s a great start. Using GIS to tackle specific business challenges, that’s how many organizations begin. [But] without having a broader strategy, you risk capping its potential a bit. A strategic approach helps scale your solution across different teams, avoid duplication of efforts, and focus on the highest impact use cases. It ensures that your GIS investment is aligned with business goals, delivering return on investment and long-term value. So having an end goal in mind as you’re doing it is a really good thing to start with in addition to implementing that GIS technology.

Dane Myers, Prologis: I think ultimately that’s where you start—you have a specific purpose in mind. I know that at Prologis, that’s actually how we got started. But I think that there’s a lot of other initiatives and challenges that geospatial ultimately can support regarding any industry or any business, just because of how flexible geospatial is and how many industries it does go in. And so, therefore, you could definitely find other uses for geospatial technology in your business. I think the biggest part is just developing a vision and just understanding how you can communicate to leaders and connect those dots to basically push that vision forward.

Andy Wohlsperger, AECOM: My thoughts are similar to John and Dane’s. Ultimately, I think it’s a little bit of the unknown unknowns. As we’ve seen over the last 20 years, the constant evolution and evolving of geospatial technology, and the data availability, and the ever-evolving business needs and use cases—may they be fiscally constrained or geopolitically driven—without a strategic approach, an implementation that’s just solely focused on one business challenge can soon reach the end of its life. So it’s a little bit about resiliency, about the unknown, and really extending that application life cycle to allow for, as John said, the scaling of things. But then, as also Dane said, the flexibility to benefit from newly available solutions, and then also integration with other solutions.

What we’ve seen is that the use cases of GIS have really exploded within our project delivery once we basically brought in the non-GIS professional. Once our engineers or scientists saw the value of GIS . . . those that were converted are bringing use cases that I think the GIS professional probably would not have seen.