ICYMI: GIS Makes Its Mark: Three Companies, 25+ Departments

In two minutes, three thought leaders reveal how deeply the corporate world relies on location technology.

No longer confined to the real estate team, GIS technology is now an enterprise system supporting strategic decisions for marketers, supply chain managers, operations teams, and executives.

In this excerpt from a recent WhereNext webcast, location intelligence leaders from Chick-fil-A, ConocoPhillips, and AgWest Farm Credit detail the wide-ranging impact of GIS across multiple departments.

These GIS professionals—now holding titles like geospatial intelligence lead, AVP, and director of strategic insight—are key enablers of the smart enterprise, delivering high-value analytics to a growing number of business teams.

As CXOs seek business intelligence from all corners of the organization, GIS leaders are meeting the demand with an enterprise approach to location technology.

For the full conversation, check out the on-demand webcast.

Chris Chiappinelli, WhereNext: Let’s start off with a question about scale. Maybe you can tick off the departments that use GIS at your company. We might explore some of those later on, but for now, just a quick list. Chan, who’s using GIS at Chick-fil-A?

Chan Lee, Chick-fil-A: The quick answer is, everybody, in the sense that currently at Chick-fil-A, every executive department uses it . . . from the department I’m in, (real estate), restaurant development as a whole, reinvestment, real estate developers to supply chain, marketing, financial services, comms—our risk department, as well. Wherever Esri’s product has been in place, we use it. We’ve been able to expand to those departments as well, in the sense that we have over 10,000 users on the platform.

Check out the new WhereNext webcast, “Location Intelligence in Unexpected Places.”

Roald Aageson, AgWest Farm Credit: It’s a much shorter list for us, but we’ve got about seven business units, some with multiple products and use cases. But we’ve got GIS being utilized by our appraisal department, insurance services, lending, capital markets, our credit group, risk management, and corporate administration.

Danny Allen, ConocoPhillips: I currently sit in an integrated operations team, so there are a lot of folks that we assist more along the operational front. But to name a few, we serve a lot of products out to the well planning team, our facility engineering team, electrical, automation, production, revenue, accounting, emissions, health and safety, maintenance, reliability, environmental, security, regulatory, supply chain, comms. That’s just to name a few.