Stuck in GIS Brexit?

Those English are a funny lot. Its been an odd few weeks on their little island. In the Euros football (soccer) championship, Iceland (population 300, 000) beat England (population 53 million) 2-1. Andy Murray won the Wimbledon tennis tournament (let’s not here get into the England v British discussion). And then there was Brexit. The English have voted to separate from the EU.

Oh dear!

Stuck in GIS Brexit?

With Brexit the Brits have opted for separation. So what do I mean by GIS Brexit? This post is about the many advantages of integration. Advantages, over time, the English will realise far outweigh the costs.

Think about your GIS. As I’ve mentioned many times before, GIS is coming out of the shadows. Once perceived narrowly as purely mapping software, today it is being used more widely to solve business problems. In isolation GIS is powerful software, but when integrated with other business systems it really shines. Let me share with you two examples:

Utilities- ArcGIS-Maximo Integration

Maximo is an IBM enterprise asset management (EAM) system. It is a very powerful solution used for creating and storing inspection information. Maximo Anywhere provides a set of resources for building and deploying mobile apps that integrate with IBM Maximo. Though Maximo Anywhere has a mapping component, it is very limited. We were approached by a large organization to integrate ArcGIS with Maximo. GIS functionality and offline capabilities were key requirements.

The organization needed an intuitive mobile application which allowed field staff to switch between a Maximo Anywhere powered inspection form and ArcGIS map interface with various GIS tools. The integrated solution needed to work without wireless connectivity so offline maps and feature layer editing and offline inspection forms. When back online inspection data was pushed back into Maximo, while ArcGIS data was uploaded to the respective ArcGIS layer.

This integrated solution brought together the best of both worlds: Maximo, a powerful EAM solution and ArcGIS.

Mining – ArcGIS-acQuire Integration

acQuire is described as a Geoscientific Information Management (GI) solution. Targeted at mining and natural resource companies, it enables the capture, management and delivery of geoscientific observations. We were approached by a large mining company. Their exploration geologists were using acQuire to record sample data. But they needed a mobile solution which provided both GIS functionality and offline capabilities. Using GPS on the mobile device an ArcGIS driven mapping interface was developed which allowed geologists to create a point on the map marking a sample site. From this point a form could be opened which linked to the acQuire system allowing detailed sample information to be collected. Again once online the sample data was pushed back into acQuire while the GIS data was uploaded to ArcGIS.

ArcGIS and acQuire integrated proved a very popular solution to the exploration geologists, saving much time and effort.

Integration has many advantages. Synergy, or the creation of a whole that is greater than the simple sum of its parts, is a key advantage of integration. GIS when integrated with other business systems can be very powerful in helping to solve problems.

Interested in integrating GIS with your business systems? Contact us on 801-733-0723.

Tags: acQuire, arcgis, brexit, GIS, integration, maximo, mining, synergy, utility

Categories: ArcGIS Online, cloud GIS, Mobile ArcGIS, Mobile GIS, Web and mobile GIS

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 10th, 2016 at 7:18 pm. 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.