| | August 20168CIOReviewPeople Love Maps! Joyce Edson, Deputy CIO & AGM, City of Los AngelesBy hroughout history, from cave paintings to Galileo and Columbus to the paper map books many of us baby boomers had in our cars, to modern Geographic information systems (GIS), humans have an undeniable and insatiable love for maps. And love is a powerful thing. Maps cater to two of the most common and basic ways people absorb information: visual and physical. Our brains process, understand, engage and can act faster when information is presented to us visually. When data is vast or territory is unknown such as navigating our world or the Southern California freeway system, it can be presented in a way that allows us to "hold" this information in our hands, the affinity for maps is inevitable. The partnership between technology and maps through GIS, is truly one for the ages. The ability to interactively manipulate data into a context that creates relevance is life changing. Nearly every purchase, service or transaction made electronically, that has any location data, also has the ability to enhance their service via a GIS interface. It has become a function that isn't just competitive advantage, it's a competitive necessity. Businesses, that participate in location based search/rating systems, like Yelp, Foursquare, Angie's List, even the YP (Yellow Pages) are able to capitalize on Internet "foot traffic" by harvesting GPS data. Many business add GIS based services as convenience features to attract and retain customers. By putting `us' as the "center of the universe", modern GIS versions of maps, takes an affection and turns it into a love for all time.Confirmation of the importance of GIS in today's world can be seen through the 2,430,000,000 returns for a Google search on the word "maps", as well as a search in the Android Play Store that returns 258 separate map apps, and that's just in the Popular Results category. There are even more map apps that specialize in navigation, weather, transit, maps in games, maps for hiking, maps of the sky, connectivity coverage maps, and more. And this popularity is assuredly doubled with additional map apps that are Apple iOS based. This is true love and true power. GIS mapping is now embedded into almost every facet of our lives. As a decision-making tool, we don't often `blink an eye' when an app asks us if we want to share our location. After all, these apps tell us how to avoid a traffic jam, save precious minutes in our day, where the best restaurants are, where we should live, and even where family members are at any given moment. Maps take a glut of data and translate it specifically for us. Helping us navigate through a world of complexity. So what's the future for this love affair? The most obvious answer is GIS will continue to become more and more ubiquitous, integrated and relied upon. GIS capabilities will continue to be a part of every platform and data source that we're able to put a location to, and because of this, we will all eventually become GIS contributors in some way. This last part is a very important point. In this day of personal privacy concerns and fears of governmental monitoring, how do we continue to grow as a technology, reaping the benefits of GIS, when essential to the process involves capturing data that is specific to an individual and individual privacy? An ethical challenge to our love affair. TJoyce EdsonIN MY OPINION
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