GIS has demonstrated real business value, or return on investment (ROI). During the last 30 years numerous companies, agencies, and government organizations have established GIS programs to take advantage of these benefits.
You can use the ROI Stories, resources to Implement a GIS, and a PowerPoint called, Measuring Up[PDF-429 KB, 20 pages] to help you share the business case for GIS with others in your organization.
When soft economic conditions slow income, management must move quickly to control expenditures and find ways to save money or avoid costs. GIS has emerged as a technology with a reputation for helping to cut costs related to workflows and solve problems.
The advantages that GIS offers in saving time are not restricted to the man-hours saved or an increase in turnaround time in handling tasks or projects. Another benefit is an organization’s capacity to handle staff workloads for jobs that would otherwise be shifted to overtime, delayed, or left undone. When organizations apply geo-reengineering efforts designed to increase efficiency and productivity, more tasks can be accomplished within the same period.
GIS combines information sources that provide the most accurate, up-to-date facts to the most departments or individuals. Information that is more accurate results in better products, and whether the products are decisions, analyses, reports, or routing solutions, the GIS is a valuable tool for supporting the production of these results.
Businesses have long viewed improved productivity as a way to be more competitive and increase profits. As labor and economic resources dwindle and older procedures reach a point of diminishing returns, organizations look toward new opportunities for improving performance. Just as managers view GIS as a tool to increase efficiency in reengineering processes, they are looking at the roles geography and GIS play in daily operations to improve productivity.
Integrating a GIS creates effective communication and collaboration. A GIS can assemble and share a range of information among various departments and present it in an understandable way that is useful for interdepartmental staff, external stakeholders, business partners, clients, and the public.
The ever present green ledger sheets stacked in accounting offices are becoming things of the past as GIS technology becomes an integral part of financial planning, sales management, grant administration, and donation collection. GIS streamlines the information and reveals the geographic links between accounts and revenue.
GIS technology improves the decision making process by running multiple scenarios efficiently and rapidly. In a short period, GIS analyses can offer multiple alternatives for review by industry experts and management.
As widespread belt tightening causes fiscal planners to sharpen their pencils, GIS is helping to bring the spreadsheet into focus. With its analytical, reporting, and tracing functions, GIS is a natural geo-spreadsheet.
Executives and managers rely on organization-wide data repositories as decision support tools. Organizing data in a GIS creates datasets that are reusable and geographically referenced.
For quick and efficient production and delivery, many companies and agencies have cultivated enterprise resource planning (ERP) technology. ERP helps to streamline, analyze, and automate business processes such as accounting, finance, record keeping, inventory, e-commerce, supply chain, human resources, sales, shipping, and customer service. These same companies are integrating GIS with their ERP systems to fully maximize benefits and effectively manage resources.
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