Monday’s keynotes at the GEOINT Symposium 2016 held this week in Orlando, Fla. began with an engaging view of global connectivity from global strategist and author Parag Khanna, author of Connectography, Mapping the Future of Global Civilization. His belief is that the world is at the beginning of the “connectivity revolution.” He asked the audience to consider how they might change the way maps are constructed in order to emphasize today’s global connectivity.

Selling versus solving seems lately to keep coming to my attention. I’ve watched, heard from others and experienced directly a sales pitch in place of solution discussion. In my case we have been looking for a BI platform to integrate with GIS to solve a particular client problem. So doing my due diligence I reached out to various BI vendors. And what was I met with? A features fest.

“Our platform can do this and that and comes with all these super useful apps and tools. You can configure this and that. Do it yourself or have us help”.

Overwhelming, and frankly bloody useless. Did they once ask about the problem which needs solving? …… Nope.