Acronym for geographical information systems (GIS) has been in use for decades. Almost everybody (in IT industry at least) knows about it. So why have I stopped using it altogether? There are actually several reasons.
1) today GIS tends to be associated to opposite of enterprise IT solutions and integration; it is something only specialists can do, and is often done in silo. It is also associated with complicated, which for customers means high cost and risky/hard integration. Often it is associated with proprietary or black-boxed systems and as such is expected not to fully comply with organizations architecture, processes and workflow.
2) spatial vendors have not helped on raising the public image of GIS; it is in vendors interests to promote specialist nature of GIS- this makes it easy to keep software prices up. Furthermore GIS analysts and developers are encouraged to associate within their own groups. Even the newer terminology promotes this - Enterprise GIS for example was invented to promote enterprise level GIS solutions, when in reality it promotes one proprietary vendor solution.
3) instead of term geographical people tend to use nowadays spatial or geospatial. Also acronym GIS is widely used for various abbreviations, just google out the definition of it - I think there was some 50 different meanings for it,
So I believe acronym GIS has a stigma on it, instead I use terms like geospatial and geo-IT, what do you think?
1) today GIS tends to be associated to opposite of enterprise IT solutions and integration; it is something only specialists can do, and is often done in silo. It is also associated with complicated, which for customers means high cost and risky/hard integration. Often it is associated with proprietary or black-boxed systems and as such is expected not to fully comply with organizations architecture, processes and workflow.
2) spatial vendors have not helped on raising the public image of GIS; it is in vendors interests to promote specialist nature of GIS- this makes it easy to keep software prices up. Furthermore GIS analysts and developers are encouraged to associate within their own groups. Even the newer terminology promotes this - Enterprise GIS for example was invented to promote enterprise level GIS solutions, when in reality it promotes one proprietary vendor solution.
3) instead of term geographical people tend to use nowadays spatial or geospatial. Also acronym GIS is widely used for various abbreviations, just google out the definition of it - I think there was some 50 different meanings for it,
So I believe acronym GIS has a stigma on it, instead I use terms like geospatial and geo-IT, what do you think?