Geographic information systems underpin many elements of the programme for government, writes GORDON SMITH

FROM MAPPING the ghost estates littered around Ireland to helping relief efforts in Japan after the recent earthquake, the geographic information systems (GIS) developed by Esri cover a lot of ground, literally.

While Google Maps and smartphones may have put location technology in people’s hands, that’s just part of the picture says Esri Ireland’s country manager Paul Synnott. “The real power of GIS is not just about putting a point on a map. It’s about the relationship between that point on a map to all of the other information that’s available for that particular area,” he says.

Not to be confused with ESRI, the economic think-tank, Esri is a software and services company and part of the world’s leading GIS technology provider.

Synnott defines GIS as “adding location to all the data that you might have inside your organisation. All businesses ask questions: how, what, why, who. By attaching location to anybody’s data we can now ask another question: where.”

Those questions are being posed by a growing number of organisations and the answers are helping them to make better decisions or to save money. For example, Northern Ireland Water saved £50,000 (€57,500) in annual costs by using GIS to plot the most efficient routes for its maintenance trucks, Synnott says.

“At the end of the day, when it comes back inside the business, there are only a number of drivers: is it going to help reduce costs, create efficiencies or improve service delivery to a customer? Just having a map on your handheld isn’t actually going to do that,” he says.

Esri’s systems have also been used to map the ghost estates across the State. The National Building Agency used Esri technology to capture the information on behalf of the Department of the Environment and then provided this data to the National Institute for Regional and Spatial Analysis. (It is available on the All Island Research Observatory website).

A year-long project with the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government is currently underway to consolidate all planning information across the entire State. Clicking a location on a map shows what use the land has been zoned for, how much housing is in that area and whether it could sustain more or is oversubscribed. This will enable more consistent planning decisions and, by implication, avoid the mistakes of the past?

That project is one of the many driving Esri Ireland’s plans to almost double in size over the coming year. The company has already begun hiring for up to 27 new jobs in its Dublin office. Some of the staff may be allocated to work on United Kingdom projects, since the company operates a shared pool of professional services staff with its UK operation.

Synnott says the sales pipeline in Ireland is strong. Many elements in the programme for government are underpinned by GIS and the rural broadband scheme announced this week will also need location technology, he says.

The local and central government sectors continue to be Esri’s primary source of business here. While more private sector firms have begun using GIS as prices have fallen and web access has made it easier to use, the public sector brings in three-quarters of revenue for Esri’s Irish operation.

GIS systems are seldom sold off-the-shelf. Synnott says software licences typically account for just 20 per cent of a contract’s value. Many of the services that Esri provides involve compiling or sometimes “cleaning” data on customers’ systems so that it can be layered on top of maps.

Census data is one of the richest sources of information for this, says Synnott. At the Department of Education, officials can query maps through a web browser, zooming in to population areas and using drop-down menus to see if pupil numbers are trending up or down over time. This can be checked against population data to see how many children will need school places in years ahead or whether a given area has enough, or too many, schools relative to demand.

Social media is a growing data source for GIS. Esri’s ArcGIS online software is available as a free service that lets people create their own maps or use those other people have created. A sample on the company’s Irish site (esri-ireland.ie) is a Map My Tweet service that lets people search for a subject and find all of the Tweets containing the word displayed on a map of Ireland based on where they were posted.

It also has a wider application in disaster response: in the aftermath of the Japanese earthquake this year, Esri took the information which people were sending via Twitter, YouTube, Flickr or even text messages and mapped it to help relief efforts by creating a common operational picture of the situation.

In such cases the company provides its technology on a pro bono basis. With $794 million (€558 million) in annual revenues worldwide and plenty of work planned in Ireland, the company is unlikely to be asking where its heading.