Geospatial Information Systems and Enterprise Collaboration

Abstract

Organizations and teams are becoming increasingly more distributed as groups work to expand their global presence while rationalizing team members across skill sets and areas of expertise instead of geographies. With this expansion comes the need for a robust and comprehensive language for pinpointing locations of globally distributed information systems and knowledge workers. Geospatial information systems (GISs) provide a common framework for jointly visualizing the world. This shared understanding of the world provides a powerful mechanism for collaborative dialogue in describing an environment, its assets, and procedures. The collaborative framework that GIS provides can help facilitate productive dialogue while constraining impulses of extreme positions. Collaboration and GIS intersections take many forms. Under a collaborative work-flow model, individuals use GIS to perform their job and post data back to the central database (e.g., engineering designs and as-built construction).