GIS Industry Predictions 2024 – Dawood Engineering

By Jodie Gosselin, GISP, is the GIS director at Dawood Engineering (Dawood),

Jodie Gosselin

As I look forward to 2024, my industry predictions revolve around the immediate changes I see occurring in AEC firms like Dawood Engineering. Changes that are right in front of me and that I’m working with my team to solve.

In a recent LinkedIn post, I touted how pleasantly surprised I was with ArcGIS Pro’s functionality and capabilities after needing to get into the weeds and use it for data analysis, map production, web sharing, and data management. Having been a die-hard ArcMap user my entire career, I was stubborn in my resistance to change. What I learned from publicly announcing my new-found admiration for ArcGIS Pro is that there are a lot of “closed-door” ArcGIS Pro fans out there.

Although the migration to ArcGIS Pro has been steadily occurring in our community, I predict 2024 to be the year a culture shift occurs and ArcGIS Pro becomes the primary software of all AEC Esri users, and the beginning of ArcMap being phased out by GIS users. A lot of advancements have been made to Pro since it was originally released years ago and the need to toggle between ArcMap and ArcPro is now unnecessary. With the prevalence of ArcGIS web applications and data sharing workflows, ArcGIS Pro has hooked many users with its level of integration into these tasks. More users will start to see and appreciate the other advances that have been made to Pro in other areas like linear referencing, map layouts, and data editing.

This is significant because it’s forcing teams like Dawood’s GIS group to reconsider many of our standard operating procedures. New workflows, standards, naming conventions, and folder structures are needed for teams like ours to support this shift in technology. My team closed 2023 through a series of meetings where new standards were established to support these changes. We particularly found it challenging to establish protocols around advanced GIS solutions that encompass many technologies —including Survey123, ArcGIS Dashboards, custom reports, and webhooks.

Along these same lines, technology changes are starting to impact our workforce, where geospatial professionals need to ensure that their skillsets evolve with the speed of technical advancement. As software like Esri, Autodesk, and Trimble become more integrated in how we exchange data, many processes and procedures performed by GIS technicians or computer-aided design and drafting will evolve through more efficient uses of technology. Our company is already seeing this, particularly in many international markets where machine learning, immersive reality, cloud computing, and IoT are more and more the norm versus the exception.

A prominent area where we are seeing this type of evolution is in the use of AI—used to increase the speed at which we perform tasks with its automation, prediction, and pattern recognition abilities. For example, the accuracy at which AI can be leveraged to digitize high resolution imagery into vector maps will start to change the way this task is performed in AEC firms globally, requiring our current staff to learn new skills.

We need to focus on upskilling existing staff to ensure that we advance with technology. In Dawood’s case, this includes training non-technical staff, such as our marketing department, on the use of GIS tools for storytelling, collecting feedback, and streamlining operational workflows.

About Author:

Jodie Gosselin, GISP, is the GIS director at Dawood Engineering (Dawood), a multidisciplinary design and technology firm founded in 1992. She has 20 years of experience in GIS with a focus on utilities and asset management while delivering comprehensive geospatial services across the municipal, transportation, survey, and environmental markets throughout the U.S. and Europe. Gosselin served as president of the New England chapter of the Urban and Regional Information Systems Association (NEURISA) and serves on the EnerGIS Committee. A 2022 Esri AEC Hero, Jodie is an acknowledged expert in web-based GIS with experience developing enhanced GIS data collection tools and award-winning project delivery solutions.

Category: Industry Predictions

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 11th, 2024 at 12:37 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.