Happy Christmas and all that from the AGI

It’s been quite a hectic six months since joining the AGI back in July with the deep end of GeoCommunity and FOSS4G followed by the remaining showcase events and business planning for 2014. I’ve enjoyed getting back into the world of geo after five years in marketing and the AGI certainly seems a good place to pick up what is going on in the industry.

This is just a quick entry (I have lots of stuff to finish before Christmas) to say happy Christmas to all our members (and any non members reading the blog). Writing blog entries after several pints of Boxing Day beer doesn’t seem like a very good idea so the blog will be back in January 2014. There will be a lot of exciting announcements in January regarding the events for next year (and the website and maybe some others...). One thing I can tell you is that the first major AGI event of the year will be held in Glasgow on the 18^th March and this event may have something to do with the exciting work that Glasgow City Council are currently undertaking...

I’ll still manage to cram some (lots of) opinion in as well although my last attempt to be controversial ended with people agreeing with me, must try harder.

Anyway I hope everyone has a good Christmas and if anyone comes across any good geo/Christmas trivia or tat please let me know!

Ordnance Survey have started it with a list of festive place names, they did pinch one of these (Cold Christmas) from my suggestion for creepy Halloween place names but I guess I’ll forgive them.

GI: The Private Frontier

I have been promising/threatening an opinion piece (rant) for a while and here it is. This was actually thought up during the discussion and interaction session at AGI Cymru and relates to spreading GI into the private sector (selling services and products to the private sector that is). Traditionally the public sector has always been the main consumer of GI in the UK partly due to the huge range of geocentric tasks the various organisations undertake and partly due to how it is financed and run. Whilst this is likely to continue for the meantime the ongoing cuts to public funding mean that GI producers need new revenue sources if they are to grow.

Obviously this is easier said than done and although some inroads have been made this still remains a very unsaturated market. There seem to be two major reasons for this, firstly the perception around cost of GI systems and services and a lack of understanding of the benefits; in this case it is the second issue that I want to discuss. I am not a GI specialist but I have spent a reasonable amount of time managing and selling some reasonably complex services to a whole range of private sector organisations. Anyway my proposition is that GI is simply not being sold to the private sector in the right way. I have been to all the AGI events since June and a few other geo ones (FOSS, Mapping Showcase etc) and it seems like as an industry we are preaching to the converted.

The focus in our case studies is on how a solution was delivered, what the innovations were and how the technology was used. There is very little focus of what the benefits are and when there is these are described in a way that is technical and abstract from measurable business benefits. I am not saying that the work being done and the products and services available are unimpressive, quite the opposite in fact, simply that they are not being packaged in the correct way.

The fundamental concern of senior managers (who have the buying power) at private companies is profit and expenditure and this is how any service needs to be pitched. They are not concerned with the fine detail of the software solution or how the datasets will be handled (that’s for the due diligence people later in the process). If for example a company is pitching a route optimisation product to a logistics manager their concern is how much it will save them in vehicle costs and hours as this is how the investment will be justified. Again this is not to say that people outside the industry are incapable of understanding how GI products work just that in my experience this is not what is going to excite them.

The approach of the GI industry still seems geared towards large organisations with GIS teams that understand the language we are used to talking in. This needs to change to a strongly benefits and ROI focused approach if inroads are going to be made into the private sector. Obviously one problem is that is often hard to guarantee an efficiency saving based on implementation of GI but at the very least case studies of past work need to focus more on the tangible financial benefits the client received.

This is a major cultural change and a change the AGI needs to make as well. The prize awarded for best project based on business case and ROI is a start but in my opinion these are criteria that should be taken in to account for any award.

Anyway that’s my thoughts over, comments (and evidence proving me wrong) welcome.

Review of AGI Showcase: Cymru

Unfortunately with two events in one week and the awards write up this review has been pushed back a little bit. Still I think the last Showcase event of the year is definitely worthy of the last review of the year.

Setting Up

The latest showcase event saw the AGI team travelling down to the SWALEC Stadium in Cardiff (which had very helpful staff and top notch cakes). Arriving bright and early after a very sensible pub dinner the night before we were soon set up alongside the 14 sponsors and ready for the delegates to arrive. The conference was well attended with the majority of delegates coming in a flurry of last minute booking (apparently this is normal for the Cymru event but is rather unnerving when you’re new).

And so it begins...

Anyway the conference soon got underway with opening statements from the AGI Cymru chair and keynotes from Ordnance Survey and Natural Resources Wales (NRW). Vanessa’s talk on building a geographic partnership with Wales was particularly interesting given the relatively recent change in the GI landscape in Wales resulting from the creation of NRW. Dr Roberts from NRW own talk was an interesting look at how evidence is used within an ecosystem approach to natural resource management.

After the break I was forced to flip a coin to choose between the two streams as both contained talks I was really keen to see. Anyway it came up tails and I duly trotted up the stairs to stream two. Stream two started with a presentation on ‘Delivering High Performance Open Source Based Spatial Data Infrastructures’ which was a client case study example. Unusually for a client case study however this was quite frank about the limitations and lessons learnt from the project which helped to make it interesting. Following this was a very speedy and succinct update on INSPIRE in Wales provided by Bill Oates. Finally the stream ended with ‘New Technologies for Visualizing Data in the Coastal Zone’ presented by Nicholas Holden. This presentation consisted of a passionate case for 3D and improved visualisation followed by a comprehensive demonstration of the capabilities of the technology including a seamless 3D dataset of all of SW England.

Sponsor Chat

After lunch (which as mentioned above was very tasty) we had the lightening talks. Unfortunately the audience started to thin after lunch; possibly due to travel times, it being December or a perception that the lightening talks were not as valuable. If it was for the third reason then people missed out, limiting people to six minutes really brings out the best in the presenter and we saw six great talks including two very different takes on good cartography tips. This was a really good format for waking people up after lunch and could perhaps be used as a bit of a morning icebreaker in the future. This was followed up by a discussion session on the challenges facing GI which I will not report in detail here as it will form the basis of a rant (ahem) informed observation on next week’s blog, not about the session but about one of the issues raised.

Discussion Time

The event ended with the afternoon plenary on the FishMap Mon project. This is an ambitious project gathering both quantitative environmental data on the seabed ecosystem and qualitative data on the activities of recreational and commercial fishermen around Anglesey. All this data has been overlaid to create a map of fishing type and intensity compared to the vulnerability of the sea bed ecosystem. The resulting data allows for better understanding and management of fishing activity in the region.

This brought the event and indeed the 2013 Showcase series to a close. Fear not we will be back in 2014 with another programme of events (bigger and better). In the meantime keep an eye on the AGI website for SIG events, Geodrinks and more.

Awarding Innovation in 2013

Congratulations AGI Award 2013 Winners!

Last week’s blog (a review of the AGI Cymru event) has been slightly delayed, largely due to me being too busy working on events to write about them. However the final event of the year took place last Thursday, the AGI awards! Today’s entry will be a quick overview of the awards and what they mean to the community. AGI Cymru will get its turn on Thursday with a full round up of the event.

Anyway the awards... First up, why do we do them? Well apart from being a nice cheerful note to end the year on the awards serve a very real purpose. The AGI exists to further the reach and impact of GI in the UK (for the betterment of wider society and the economy). As well as increasing awareness of GI this also means promoting innovation and excellence within the community and just as importantly, shouting about it when it occurs! As well as providing recognition for the achievements of the winners the awards also showcase their ideas to others in the industry.

The awards followed a slightly different format this year (apparently, I wasn't

Iain's Winning Presentation

here last year) with presentations from the winners of each showcase’s best paper award. Combined with the winners from GeoCommunity this meant that attendees were treated to the best of the conference content from the year in one go. Unfortunately due to some rather inclement weather combined with our Scottish
members’ prolific success at the awards we were short a couple of speakers. Luckily Iain Langlands our best paper winner from GeoCommunity arrived just in time to present his Future Cities Demonstrator paper, albeit after a slightly hairy flight down from Glasgow.

Following on from this was the ceremony itself. The awards are presented for innovation and best practice in a variety of categories and we had some very strong submissions this year as can be seen by the joint winners in one category (too good to choose between). The categories are:

Central Government - States of Guernsey (Sponsored by: Compass Informatics)

Local Public Services - Warwickshire County Council and Central & SW Wales Shared ICT Services (Sponsored by: Ordnance Survey)

Private Sector – Island GIS (Sponsored by GIStandards)

Charitable Status – Canal and River Trust (Sponsored by Scisys)

Business Case and ROI – Thomson Ecology (Sponsored by ConsultingWhere)

Student of the Year - Andy Bell Queen’s University Belfast (Sponsored by 1Spatial)

This year we also had a new award, the INSPIRE for SMEs award. This award is being run as part of the EU funded smeSpire programme. This programme has been created to help SMEs operating in GI take

Our latest award being presented

advantage of the challenges organisations are facing from INSPIRE implementation. This award was won by Linknode.

Post Awards Drinks at RGS

We also ran a number of best paper awards but I am aware that another list might be pushing it a bit, the details of the winners can be found here. There are some really excellent papers on there and most of them can be found under the relevant events page on the website (and will be available in a much more intuitive way on the new website next year).

Finally I just wanted to say congratulations to all the award winners and thank you to all the sponsors who made the awards possible. We might be shaking things up with the awards next year as we've had a few ideas about how we can better engage with an encourage innovation both within and beyond our membership. Watch this space, January is going to be a storm of exciting announcements!

P.S. Congratulations to Abigail and Angharad
our Volunteers of the Year.

Tunnelling into the Mapping Showcase, a brief events roundup

The penultimate month of the year seems to be a popular one for events both in and out of the geo arena. Last week I attended the NCE Tunnelling conference (courting those engineers and surveyors again) and the more traditionally geo Mapping Showcase. I'm going to give a quick roundup of both of these events (with a bit more emphasis on the Mapping Showcase).

My main reason for attending the Tunnelling event was to try and meet potential GI users beyond our usual group (much like Slope Engineering the week before). The tunnelling industry in the UK is both one that is booming and one that is willing to embrace innovation and technology. I hadn't really thought of this until the conference but the majority of major infrastructure projects under way or upcoming in the UK include a tunnelling component. Crossrail, HS2 and the Thames Tideway Tunnel (unsurprisingly) all include major tunnelling work and that amounts to billions of pounds worth of capital spend. This is in addition to the programme of tunnel assessment and maintenance work undertaken by asset owners such as TFL and the Highways Agency.

This represents a significant market and as I have already said one that is willing to accept innovation. BIM or at least systems very similar to BIM and 3D modelling are already being used by the tunnelling industry. Despite this I encountered a perception that GI (GIS specifically) would not be suitable for tunnelling due to the largely underground nature of the work. The perception here is that GI is just surface mapping and not applicable to the complex 3D environment faced by tunnellers. This view seems to be the main barrier to GI provides breaking in to this potentially lucrative market. There is some crossover already however with hardware suppliers like Leica and Topcon (both AGI members) having a presence at this event.

It seems clear that the GI sector has expertise and products that can help the tunnelling sector where spatial precision is so crucial. However the key to accessing this growing market (both in the UK and internationally, the money being spent on the Doha metro is insane) is going to be overcoming preconceptions of what we do and demonstrating the technologies and skills we have like 3D modelling, remote sensing and subterranean mapping.

Mapping Showcase

On to a more usual geo event next; the Mapping Showcase, finale to this year’s programme of Geo Data events. This year the event was held in a hotel somewhere in the border zone between Fulham and Kensington (very handy for me). This turned out to be a typically lively event, it was hard to get a feel of the numbers (and as a free event a fair amount of no shows can be expected) but the hall felt full and we were certainly busy on the AGI stand particularly during the 11am rush.

Sadly this precluded me getting to as many of the sessions as I would have liked but I shouldn't really complain if people are interested in membership! However I did manage to squeeze a few presentations in. ‘BIM, Big Data and the Little Things’ was a great presentation on how grand ideas like BIM and Big Data can still be applied to and benefit smaller projects. ‘Big ideas for small things’ or some similar phrase was the soundbite of the session.

The National address Gazetteer gave an interesting presentation into what goes into creating and maintaining a National Data Infrastructure. I think the most striking thing watching this presentation was how little I knew about how much effort went into this and therefore that the general population just take having access to this kind of data for granted.

The final presentation I saw was from Gavurin showing discussing how businesses that aren't GIS businesses can use GIS data. This was a great summary on how GIS can be made relevant to decision makers and if presented properly can become part of wider ‘business intelligence’ and conversely how the principles of business intelligence can be applied to GI. This is a topic I am particularly interested in as I believe the GI industry struggles to sell its value to other sectors. (I may rant about this in the next blog post).

Anyway to summarise the showcase was generally a fun and informative event and it was great to see some of our members and meet some hopefully soon to be members. Sadly I wasn't able to make any of the interactive ‘smell mapping’ sessions but would love to hear from anyone who did.

Also don’t forget it is the AGI Awards tomorrow, this is our chance to celebrate excellence in GI and take a look at some of the innovation that is taking place in our industry. There are still a few places left and it’s also a great chance to visit the lovely Royal Geographical Society building that we call home.