Conference Program Tracks
GIS-Pro 2011 Conference Program Tracks
- Roadmaps for GIS Professionals - Spatial information professionals often have unique experience, training, and education credentials that are mostly technical. Yet, your continuing professional advancement will depend on your ability to communicate with your direct clients, being business units, your boss or decision-makers, the social networks you build, and the ongoing education you receive throughout your career. To become a leader, both students and specialists alike must develop a wide-ranging set of skills. This track was formed to address a number of issues pertinent to the image and professional development path of the geospatial technologies professional in today’s working world. Professional development plays a large part in defining a profession and also encourages positive growth in your career track.
- The Business Benefits of GIS - The organizations that take advantage of the power of GIS to directly support operations and decision making processes are unquestionably ahead of the curve. While the ultimate challenge for a GIS professional is to deliver solutions that best support the organization and achieve its mission, we can’t ignore additional challenging factors such as knowing how to interact with the variations of the organizational social and political climate as well as orchestrating the complex relationship between people, data, applications, software and hardware. In a time where budgets are getting smaller and the list of requirements is rapidly expanding, excelling at essential management techniques has become a survival must for every GIS professional. How do you best illustrate the direct and indirect benefits of GIS utilization and educate your organization about how GIS can increase productivity and save money? Benchmarking, organizational education, GIS maturity models, business case models, ROI techniques, financial and budgeting considerations and success stories where GIS was the answer are some of the topics that will be discussed within this track.
- Immersive GIS - What's next and how do we catch up with what's already here? In an era where technology is not only powerful but is also part of our everyday world, GIS faces enormous challenges. The 'Cloud' is the new buzzword. Social Media connects anyone, anything, anytime, or anywhere. What are the pros and cons? The geospatial industry is trending at a rapid pace to be developed in its totality over the web. Doing GIS in the Cloud or integrating it with social media involves attention to design, interface, tools and usability. The base of Web2.0, open GIS, wikis, and tweeters rely on collaboration. Collaboration without guidelines and standards can be as bad as no collaboration. Visualization, analysis, identification, authentication, security, crowd-sourced data, accuracy, and advanced sharing are just some of the new challenges to leverage GIS as a solution provider in this New Social Age of technology. Some of these challenges are not new and have been haunting the geospatial professional for years, while others are entirely new such as how to use mash-ups to enable sharing capabilities, broadcasting RSS or GEORSS, embedding GIS gadgets and widgets, integrating GIS on Yahoo or Google pipes, not to mention embedding apps in Facebook. The challenges may have the same fundamental concepts but they are coming in new shapes and our customers’ expectations are higher than ever. This track will demonstrate new geospatial industry trends as well as how GIS is being developed to utilize new state of the art technologies.
GIS Speaks Out - Geospatial technologies are now considered mainstream components within the overall enterprise IT framework and are increasingly used for a wide range of business process automation and to support decision making. This track looks at how GIS technologies, programs, and solutions are maturing across the Enterprise, and, as a result, providing much greater return on investment than if kept in isolated silos. Obviously, this takes more than technology itself to be successful. Leadership, governance, creativity, change management, and collaboration, are but a few of the non-technical characteristics that lead to GIS maturity. A true leader not only identifies areas where GIS can support business processes but is also the figure that inspires, motivates and enables such integration. Learn about ways to integrate GIS within other organizational units as well as how to use GIS leadership skills to achieve a pervasive level of maturity within your organization!
One Government - We often hear the cries at tax time that "there is only one taxpayer!". While this is true, how should public sector representatives of multiple jurisdictions and overlapping levels of government (federal, state/provincial, regional, local) act collaboratively as One Government? What are some tried and true approaches to data sharing challenges and what is the role of government in setting standards? How do data "stewards" obtain the official mandate and funding to perform their function for the community as a whole? What activities can promote government transparency and accountability? Can we get government to support and fund spatial data as an infrastructure asset with appreciating value (as opposed to depreciating value) over time? How can initiatives such as Open Data and Gov 2.0 contribute to a better return on the geospatial investment, while still maintaining necessary protection of privacy? How is the private sector interacting with this module? Hear about cross-jurisdictional collaboration success stories that led to a "one government" approach. With any luck, this track will bring together a collective conscience that will provide some insight and creativity into building solutions that address many of these complex challenges!
