2019 SES at Esri UC: Welcome and The Future of GIS

greetings everyone good morning welcome to the 2019 senior executive summit of the ESRI international user conference my name is James sallows I'm a writer magazine writer a book writer a friend of ESRI admirer of GIS and I'll be your host for this day's discussion I think we have a lot of fascinating material ahead of us today we conceived of this audience as being people who are involved in the high end doing of putting GIS tools and related data tools to work in governmental organizations and city governments in NGOs in businesses in public utilities and public safety programs the entire array of the way people use these these tools and you're going to see a sequence of presentations addressed to those concerns we're going to start this morning with four speakers with fascinating complimentary presentations from public agencies from the US Census from the British Ordnance Survey from the Singapore land agency and from a water district here in California then we're going to have after that we're going to have three speakers from business and non-governmental organizations from the Kohler Company from CBRE and from a major local health program here in California we're going to end the day with two extraordinary governors one has just traveled here from Kenya and I'll tell you more about him later on the other is from here in the United States it is Martin O'Malley former mayor of Baltimore governor of Maryland whose book you all have on the table it heals me he'll be talking about the way kids tried to pioneer smarter government using data tools to improve the often criticized and always difficult tasks of running governments at the city level the state level and the national level I mentioned earlier that we're trying to think of a connection among the presentations you'll be hearing today and indeed those through the rest of the week I want to say a little bit more about a particular kind of connection before introducing Jack Dangermond who in a way is responsible for everybody who has gathered at this conference today there have been different themes that sra has has advanced over the last couple of years to try to crystallize what it is doing and I think they're there three of them that stick in my mind one was the the phrase you saw just at the end of this last presentation the science of where this is the idea that everything happens somewhere and for a very large array of human activities that geospatial tagging knowing where things happen can be a very important analytical tool and so the science of where is sort of the overarching theme for what GIS does around the world and businesses in governments etc a second theme that that SV has been talking about recently is called seeing what others can't that is the idea that there is a view of the world of business trends of natural world trends of any other trend you want to think which these kind of analytical and depiction tools allow people to have that they wouldn't otherwise get the way I often think of this is to imagine people working trying to find their way through a two-dimensional maze let's say a cornfield maze or a high hedge maze or something like that and they can't see where they're going the concept of seeing what others can't is as if you could rise above that maze and see in three dimensions the barriers people are encountering the blind paths are going down etc so that is a second conceptual phrase for what ESRI has been doing of seeing what others can't one that has been more and more prominent and I mention all of three of these because I think they're worth keeping simultaneously in mind is the idea that these geospatial information tools constitute a new intelligent nervous system let me say why I think I personally think that's so interesting and this will be a sort of segue to introducing Jack Dangermond has anybody in this room heard of a military strategist named John Boyd so I have heard of a military strategist named John Boyd therefore I will tell you about him back in the nineteen John Boyd was celebrated within the US military for having a revolutionary concept of how almost every form of competitive human activity operates John Boyd had been a successful fighter pilot in the Korean War era he was a trained pilots for a long time after that and his idea was essentially any kind of human interaction or even natural world operation interaction went through what he called the OODA loop that's oh oh da and the OODA loop from his point of view he described it as observation orientation decision action observation you see what's going on orientation you put that into the framework of where you think you are where you're think you're going decision trying to deciding what is the right next step to take an action which is then taking that next step and John Boyd evolved this from the way fighter pilots were you know which planes could help new for the others in the Korean War and he had it for business he was a consultant for Toyota for a long time in their interactions with General Motors and he made this a it became celebrated within the military militaries around the world for this idea of how people how systems how individuals how companies how natural systems were able to respond most accurately and most quickly to the changing array of stimulus around them in a way this is a description of a nervous system a way to have sensors to bring in new data a way to collect the data in the appropriate places a way to process it as human beings do or we should in their brains a way to do it within organizations etc and so when I read that that ESRI was now promoting the idea that it's tools constitute a new intelligent nervous system this this made instant sense to me we have the new applications and sensors around the world which are feeding information all the time this is the observation stage of the of the system we have the ways in which they transmit that to the relevant points of action this is Orion station we have analytical and decision engines to make it possible to take the next steps and what we're going to hear about today from our speakers and tomorrow and after that during the main plenary sessions is the way these three concepts the science of we're seeing what others can't and a new intelligent nervous system collectively describe the evolving field of which you were all you're all part I'm gonna say no more about that now at the end of the day I'll try to say talk about the ways in which our presentations fit into this larger theme instead I'm going to give the podium in just about 30 seconds to my longtime family friend we grew up in the same little town of Redlands California Jack Dangermond who of course with his wife Laura has been responsible for creating this company over the decades and whose combination of technological sophistication and broad humane vision has made the company have the effect that you all see in your businesses and your companies in your NGOs and then your other activities so to give us the special tailored for SES senior executive presentation of what to think about practically and technically and in applications and for the next stage of of products and services you can expect please join me in welcoming the man who brings us all together Jack Dangermond I want to welcome you this is a special meeting it's a special group of people here in this audience look around you're a collection of people representing organizations that that don't often assemble together in the same space the purpose of this meeting is basically to cover some of those subjects that Jim talked about context concepts of GIS some of the emerging technologies and will be kind of a preview for what you see tomorrow talk about the business value I know some of you are particularly interested in that whether it be government or and private sectors give you a refresh for some of you the first time what the technology trends are that are affecting this geospatial revolution and then finally talk about implementation patterns but before I do that before I go through those things the things that are in the lower left of this slide there's another purpose and that is to connect you to get you connected to to talk with each other to build a kind of relationship of individuals of professionals so that you can learn from each other and share knowledge and altogether grow because in this room if you look around and you'll find out during the day are a collection of managers senior executives of GIS organizations maybe you're not that technical some of you definitely are but understanding what the management challenges are to make these systems really come alive and get the business value is the purpose of today and I know of no other way other than sharing real experience between you that's why the cast of characters that get up here are so interesting because they've actually done the work and they're going to share with you both their perspectives of doing the work in and how it's meant something to them but before we go any further I'd like you to all stand up and meet one of the people here so that you can get kind of a sense of this room can you do that for me now extraordinary isn't it you think about it extraordinary people that are purposeful that are in executive positions that understand the concepts of geography understand its applications and working for purpose this is an extraordinary room well each of you are running organizations are certainly in the leadership of these organizations I thought I would start this talk by sharing a little bit about essary this is its 50th year in business it's been it's been working on pretty much exactly the same theme from it's very beginning which is advancing this concept that Jim described very well about the science of where and I'll go into it more in just a moment but it is the combination of geography and GIS technology a new kind of digital science that's growing very fast our organization is strong and growing and those of you in management positions know exactly what that means what it takes takes going all in by a team of people we've been very fortunate over the years to retain our focus on strong engineering and science also some side shows guys call them sideshows they're not sideshows but promoting spatial literacy and supporting the growth of our own employees and again you in management position know exactly what that means it means supporting your employees to realize their life work this is part of the magic of what makes my organization work and then we focused especially on education and on conservation these are two themes that are well known and you'll see them against broadly applied tomorrow and then working on making a difference in partnership with you our users on many fronts our users are I would say beyond my expectations 7 million users around the world and they're in almost every kind of organization as reflected here in this room thousands of them thousands of cities thousands of national agencies organizations very similar to the very ones that you run and I would simply say we can underpin at this moment in time that GIS and geospatial infrastructure the pattern of GIS of scale have never been more important you need not only to read the newspapers to know that we are being challenged on almost every front to create a sustainable future and while we often think of that as an external thing one of the purposes of this meeting this week particularly tomorrow will be to see exactly how as managers we can begin to bring some of that understanding into our own organizations to make a difference so the purpose of this meeting is to go over some of this technology on some of the patterns and applications that people are applying so that we can see the patterns and copy the patterns and apply them broadly some of you are working on GIS in agriculture and natural resources looking for petroleum resources forty-eight of the largest oil companies in the world use GIS to do prospecting but now also complementing it with environmental environmental sustainability many organizations and mining are doing the same thing and in land cadastre thousands of organizations are using it to manage the systems of record of land the foundation for a civil society many police departments law enforcement agencies emergency responders use it to not only understand patterns of crime but address them address also disasters flooding fires hurricanes these sorts of things GIS is delivering value to cities helping them see and create more sustainable futures better land-use patterns and I like this little slide on the right that shows the ability to insert a proposed building into an urban infrastructure to see and share what it might look like it's delivering value at the base level of engineering and I know some of you work in large engineering companies in other words others of you here in this room work in Public Works agencies Jess's improving the efficiency and integrating Geographic knowledge right into the workflows today of engineering activities better managing assets squeezing out efficiency making organizations more efficient and in the business sector Wow this is treasure for business finding the right location like Starbucks does or like Walmart does or like Walgreens does or like Nike does Nike understands their patterns of customers and put the right thing in the store and doing supply chain optimization all of these things are enabled by this interesting science and some of you here are running major statistical organizations both Census and we'll hear from the US Census Department its head in a few minutes the collection of the rational data for the foundation for for our democracy in the United States and other countries as well but we'll also see and hear from people working with GIS in health care and public health and there's just thousands of applications now from malaria to Ebola to pragmatic things like this little purple map in the center this is from wall greens their drugstores they actually sell medicine to address flu and this is a flu epidemic map that's come out much faster than the CDC is able to report flu doesn't that mean they're just making it available transforming in many ways how we see and understand ourselves it's happening at many scales in environment from groundwater to climate change to looking at pollution in the oceans to looking at agriculture where best should we plant what and as we increasingly play into dominating the planets environment one of the big themes here will be to take take care of it will hear this from Jane Goodall tomorrow takari as she calls it understanding the resources of our planet and understanding where to do what where to plant corn in Mexico for example where to optimize vineyard production in the Silicon Valley or in the Napa Valley and in transportation Wow the world's largest airports are now completely run by a GIS foundation Atlanta for example or skip old airport or Los Angeles and optimizing routes this map in the upper left is bike-sharing and Manhattan this fun little stuff but behind this fun little stuff is this driving thing about creating greater efficiency squeezing out more out of what we have in our resources and in defense and intelligence national security the world now sees is able to see like this dashboard from NATO seeing everything what's going on issues of conflict and also the other side of the coin as well hear from ambassador Toscano tomorrow who runs the UN demining operation using GIS for peace people think of war rooms he describes them as peace rooms where are there potential outbreaks of conflict and what can we do to address them finally GIS has optimized simple things I say simple they're not simple at all but producing maps at a grand scale an automated database driven way to make topographic maps aeronautical charts nautical charts now database driven and will in this room is the head of the largest mapping organization world who manages for the US the production of billions of well not maps he produces millions of maps but with billions of features and updating them hundreds of thousands of times every month this is transforming it's transforming building being the building blocks the foundation pieces for this Geographic revolution now moving on a bit I'll accelerate my speech here saying simply GIS is advancing it's being driven by its integrating in all the new modern sources of data real-time data IOT data it's integrating in new kinds of computing distributed computing edge computing and it's also integrating on many new clever ideas from science and also innovative science in the frontiers of geospatial and the result watching this now for 50 years the result is a kind of coevolution of these tools accelerating really quickly it's becoming easy more accessible and it's just actually beginning to kick in the science of where as Jim elegantly described is a kind of foundation for a nervous system I'll go into this more tomorrow but as our brain operates stimulus-response know it's not simply stimulus and response its stimulus cognition the integration of values the integration of experience the integration of ethics the integration of reasoning into the process so GIS is about measurement and then visualization scenes and then analytics prediction predictive analytics then action responding intelligent planning intelligent driven decision making intelligent driven and conscious action this is the science of where is a framework and a process grounded in the fundamentals of Geographic science the science of our world what is the GIS actually if one might ask people ask me all the time I never was able to tell my mother before she passed away she didn't quite get it but I tried I know is this technical mumbo-jumbo but at this point I can say it's a system for managing and sharing and applying geographic information or geographic knowledge it focuses on content but most people understand it as analytics or mapping it's also about integration it's about integrating other kinds of information using geography or location as a common framework and what's occurring in this field is this rapid networked connected interconnected geospatial nervous system is connecting services from different places and they be able to diffuse these services and bring them together dynamically and that's supporting individuals like many of the people in your organization it's supporting teams working around common geography is supporting whole organizations are now extending to include engagement with communities citizens volunteer organizations academics and the like and again these words matter to me they're really important it's not only a platform for sharing and collaboration but it's also a platform for solving problems holistically and god only knows this is what's needed right now about going to the right or the left or polarizing political conversation it's about seeing and then acting in holistic ways GIS has evolved from desktop or workstation technology to be a enterprise platform and those of you who are CIOs in the room know approximately what I'm talking about it's cross-cutting and it has three main Lakes one is that it's a system of Records kind of a buzzword it's you know you maintain the records like your accounting system through transactions it's also a system of analytics or a system of insights this is like seeing through combining the data my business intelligence tools do and finally it's a system of engagement through maps and apps it's reaching out to engage the field it's reaching out to engage people across the enterprise and these three pillars are integrated into a common system is becoming very much real-time by integrating in IOT real-time measurements the sort of smart city or smart nation idea it's all coming alive using the power of location to integrate these different kinds of data and the four again the CIOs in the room GIS geo enables enterprise architecture you know there's sort of like three tiers of enterprise architecture there's the infrastructure layer there's the app architecture layer and there's business systems historically if GIS lived in the mission or we would call it the business system layer people would buy a desktop or they'd buy a workstation or they do analytics on a little project that's how how we actually a tester he got started doing little projects but in a couple a couple of years ago this transformed to build a lower level technology which cut right across the right across the enterprise that geospatially enabled all data and geospatial enabled all kinds of apps it was a service so today's vision of GIS is that it's both strong in the mission in the application areas but it's also a new leveling concept that can integrate data of many types geospatially enabling data maybe as a way to describe it and geospatially abling apps so all apps suddenly have a map ok I'm exaggerating a bit but that will happen that's going to happen believe me and this is not not for for academics this is actually being done in thousands of major corporations around the world they're leveraging this platform and it's being done in thousands of governments around the world from little tiny towns to whole states to national agencies and the UN for example looking at the entire world as a platform for addressing the SDGs unfortunately Stefan is not here today but he was going to speak about his work on building a global nervous system of all the countries data to address the big challenges that we're facing in the environment but you'll see enough of it tomorrow to understand what I'm talking about gyah supports multiple kinds of implementation patterns many people that use GIS just have a little desktop they connect to the web they do their own work others build integrated systems kind of like ERP systems like the financial systems or the accounting systems that many of you are used to but this new pattern and again I'm being redundant this geospatial infrastructure pattern the pattern that Jim really is talking about a nervous system is more than a system it's a system of systems it uses a portal to link and interconnect different servers or datasets around the web and allows us to bring them together to take this person's data and that person's data and overlay it dynamically this is the sort of magic that we're starting to see and you will certainly see tomorrow in many demonstrations portals abstract and bring together geographic knowledge from many sources it brings together maps and data the content side and registers them in a kind of catalog that you can search easily and discover data it also organizes people gives them identity not to say that you don't have identity but I'm saying you know identity digitally and these can be grouped for security reasons this is very important these days the ability to organize all aspects of the infrastructure but also all aspects of geographic knowledge Jess abstracts these distributed datasets it reads in imagery it reads in tabular data it reads in unstructured data it reasoned vector data and so on reads them in from distributed servers and then normalizes them dynamically again for IT people here you'll understand the immense complication of doing this technically but it's easy it means I create a common language of maps which are views of the distributed datasets which I can mash up from different kinds of sources you guys get this idea that I'm reading in data from many sources normalizing it into maps and then I can overlay these maps not just visually but I can analytically connect distributed services in heterogeneous types of formats imagery data 3d data real-time IOT data and bring it together this is kind of what your mind does you look around this is the digital this is a digital twin of what your mind actually does brings it together and expresses it in the form of maps that can be widely disseminated across an organization people can use it on their cell phone same map as the organization represents in their dashboards and apps the corollary to the data sets can make it come alive I can see it as a GIS professional I can look at this distributed data mash it up and do sophisticated analytics but I can spread Maps or analytics right across all the parts of an organization all singing off of an integrated songbook one map one view this was pioneered early on by the city of Singapore which we'll hear about later this idea of a one map city where everything is integrated in in real-time what's what's happening and I'm exaggerating a little bit but I do see actually I probably see what others can't I see that that this is is coming together at all scales interconnecting information and processes all of the rent all at the same time that's transformational for organizations everybody has this definition of what is transformation you know to me this is transformation the ability to bring all the different measurements and Sciences and workflows and activities in an organization together to create a massive integration in a city or a massive integration in a utility or a massive integration I mean it's there there is not another technology like this light and gentlemen this is not about sequels or databases or database connections it's using location the power of location to integrate and for for that concept I believe very strongly that geography and its locational characteristics will increasingly become powerful in organizations so I'm going to now very briefly cover some of the emerging capabilities that are enabling this because it's not just the architecture which I've just explained but many things are happening there is emerging on the web millions of content layers that are available for accessing and mashing up the sort of nervous system foundation these are alive their base maps with many overlays to them the weather where traffic is this isn't just like a consumer app like where's the traffic no it's a service that I can integrate in and connect with the weather service and create an app for example the post office of knowing where the weather is and where my trucks and people are and then alert that that's not a consumer app that system ash up simply made by an organization and what I see is that's happening in your organization's at lightning speed and map technology that we used to sort of take for granted as difficult is being in part taken over by the computer so that almost anybody can make beautiful maps not only web maps with smart mapping but also better standardized more automated production and charting and then more recently these map layers are being integrated into things like the Adobe cloud so your graphic design people can can make beautiful designs or into Microsoft's technologies like office so we can make inside of word or or SharePoint location analytics is a new term may be unfamiliar to some of you but it's all about being able to drag and drop data into a very intuitive environment and explore it just explore data from these different sources dynamically it's a kind of advanced data business intelligence but with an emphasis on spatial 3d visualization keeps pushing this isn't an isolated stovepipe 3d its 3d about everything buildings roads and bring in content of many types like mass of point clouds and in this 3d environment being able to plug it into augmented reality seeing what others can't using goggles and so on field apps have taken the concepts of GIS to the worker in the field for survey one two three collection or collector apps quick capture apps a brand new technology where you can be in a helicopter and just be click-click click-click click-click picking up power poles or picking up observations on the street in the car going 50 miles an hour and those observations are transactions on a shared database in the cloud also workforce management and navigation and explorations all managed centrally this collection of apps extend the fundamental GIS to new audiences and this is all becoming real time as we measure everything that moves and changes with sensors as Jim described this vision of it coming together as a nervous system all fits into play these sensors can be looked at for example with dashboards so we see the real-time counts for example homelessness or fire where our people are were the performance that's going on within our organizations measurements imagery has become an integral part of GIS used to be separate without image analytics and we'd have GIS analytics now they've fused so I can read in almost any type of imagery I can do analytics on imagery like change analysis feature extraction but mixing with the fundamental other layers of geography for creating powerful interpretations for example I might say this is last night's Landsat take loaded into a cloud that I can pan and zoom on this actually was last year's take but I'm pretending it was last night's it wouldn't matter these are the hot spots fires so if i zoom on here to last year's imagery we can see actually the paradise fire burning with different hot spots around it coming from motifs and I can see through the clouds using powerful image analytics and not only see through the cloud to see it but also automatically extract features from the imagery let's call this the fire extent boundary and now watch having done this masking I can make it as a new layer and I can overlay it on a base mountain and if I pick a 3d base map I can actually see the extent of the fire just like that isn't that cool so these are synoptic measurements coming from remote sensing in near real-time mixed with where all the people are IOT integration and once these layers are in a database I can do analytics there's hundreds and hundreds of geoprocessing tool tools to do spatial statistics now raster analytics modeling predictive modeling network analysis these you'll see again many examples of tomorrow on the frontiers of our field are the integration of AI deep learning machine learning with GIS jazz the in and of itself doesn't include all of those tools although it does include many but the ability through Python notebooks to reach out to software libraries and large collections of imagery to do machine learning for feature extraction is becoming relatively easy and prediction for example prediction of the leaks and water mains or the prediction of approximately prediction of crime no way to predict it exactly but looking at patterns like our brain does we sort of remember we I wouldn't say memorize but we have a memory and we keep learning through experiences similarly this technology is an important ingredient for for building not nervous systems GIS has traditionally been for GIS professionals but in recent years we've been building interesting developer tools for all kinds of developers not just in our community but in the open developer community being able to do client-side mapping misses these are JavaScript 4.0 tools and some of you won't understand what I'm talking about but listen this is a technology that allows you to stream data across the web and it's a little software library in a browser that allows you to do analytics in the browser no software need it it's very cool and that's happening both in 2d and also in 3d so why I predict that this is going to go very broadly is because the thousands of little startup companies who are trying to put spatial into their apps maps into their apps will be available not only for enterprise apps but also beyond and app builders now are commonplace this web app builder we introduced two years ago it's resulted in about a half a million apps being built there's actually more I'll close by just again give you an orientation to what you'll see tomorrow ESRI has basically had one product called ArcGIS this has been its home framework and it's used for the GIS market you'll see many GIS professionals and many of them are on your staff more recently like about 10 years ago we began to introduce it as a web mapping platform this has resulted in millions of users simply describing subscribing to snapping on the web and finally this location analytics environment and now developer so you get the idea this is our main product strategy but a year ago we began introducing something called geo enables systems these are highly specialized solutions for urban planning business now indoors and situational awareness these are focused applications you might think of and they are they're all available in what we're framing or calling the geospatial cloud so our strategy is really software and also increasingly SAS solutions because people are pushing us to move more on that software-as-a-service operation arch as is the focus of this it's a comprehensive platform it's designed to work for individuals as well as organizations at many scales and it's open I can't emphasize this enough it supports all the open standards it supports more spatial standards than any technology of its kind it also integrates open science libraries the whole new revolution that's occurring in data science just connects and integrates with it through Python notebooks it has many open api's and open data a big thing and then essary opens sources over 700 components of our software into github for customization configuration and extend ability of the tools and many of our users are contributing and working with us in that domain this is an important strategy for us because if it means that we can integrate well with other major complex heterogeneous environments and the evidence that this is successful is is evidenced by the enormous success has been having in enterprise spaces well Jim I've covered I think pretty much everything I wanted to say except the following this this technology is now driving and delivering enterprise systems that's a major step and some of you have implemented it in that setting and we'll hear from you this morning in your efforts to do it that just didn't happen it's required mission leadership executives just like yourselves who who get involved in it this isn't sort of like a passive ok those are the guys down the hall the most successful systems that I've seen are where executives are actually involved in it at the Ordnance Survey it was the executive leadership that really altered right into it it is turn it over to the techniques no they wanted understand its strategic value and they prototyped and iterated to build their systems which have now resulted in enormous cost savings and efficiency and also investments in developing the workforce this isn't so Oh Coco take a couple classes you know and I know it means a commitment to building and transforming your workflow it for us and then having them stay current when you go in that room tomorrow you'll see 18,000 people who are aggressively pushing the envelope to stay current on the technology not really that really is part of the game here you can't this is not a sort of passive it'll take care of itself thing and finally a culture of collaboration many of you know these cultures the idea that we can do this together feeling that's and continuous innovation from again my perspective in running essary this has been the magic of our success as we continuously reinvest over 30% of our entire revenue back into R&D and while that's more than what normal companies could ever imagine the idea that you're committed to innovation on an ongoing basis is the is the kind of organization that is required for the 21st century so jazz and geospatial infrastructure are important you already know that or you wouldn't be here also delivering value and transforming organizations in this technology that's rapidly advancing is is something that all executives like yourselves need to stay in focus and also leadership not just being at the effective technology but being the cause of the transferred transformations is is essential well ladies Amin thank you very much I'm looking forward to meeting and spending more time with some of you and also listening to these great presentations that you're about to hear and don't miss tomorrow it'll transform your life I promise you thank you [Music] [Applause] you

Channel: Esri Events

Views: 6,656

Keywords: Esri, ArcGIS, GIS, Esri Events, Geographic Information System, SES, senior executive, enterprise, James Fallows, Jack Dangermond, user conference, UC, geospatial infrastructure, 2019, CEO, digital transformation, San Diego

Id: vEJwNygFHU4

Length: 48min 22sec (2902 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 23 2019