Achieving Business Success with GIS (PDF)

Written at a practical level, suited to the business audience, this
exceptional book explores the business environment of making
GIS successful. It applies academic rigor to practical and
commercial implementation issues and offers viewpoints from all
parties involved in GIS implementation. Achieving Business
Success with GIS provides tangible advice ranging from
technical and financial to organizational and commercial. It is
unique in that it does not stop short of providing, without hype or
embellishment, practical advice and real examples regarding the
total cost of ownership of a project or finance and return
investment of GIS products. Achieving Business Success with
GIS highlights that the use of GIS technology needs to be
focused on the business issues, not the technology.

The book begins by describing the use of GIS in a global context
within a business environment as the background to outlining the
need for organizations to have a strategy for their GIS. The
book then goes on to explore the elements of a GIS strategy and
explains issues which are relevant for such approaches and how to
go about developing it.

In the closing chapters of this book, the process of specifying
and tendering for a GIS are discussed to ensure that the focus of
the reader remains on the business issues of the
organization. This is followed by examples of the best and
worst Geographic Information Systems including a discussion on
Google Earth and Web 2.0.

The combination of the statistics from the GIS / Spatial surveys
and the author's consulting experiences make this book an
invaluable resource for GIS managers in government (federal, state
and local) and utilities, organisations using GIS, and students and
lecturers in this field.