Undiscovered countries

Enterprise geospatial strategy development

More non-traditional geospatial consumers are becoming geo-curious. How can our community help to develop geospatial strategies for organizations with little intrinsic geo-experience?

Photo by Bud Helisson on Unsplash

We have touched on complementary assets, innovation curves, and dominant designs in past discussions. Each of these is a critical subject, but in aggregate, they amount to additional capabilities being available to an unprepared market. We have started presenting geospatial technology to a group of industries which have little intrinsic knowledge of digital geography or GIS (Geographic Information Systems). This is actually wonderful news; our effort to get out of the “GIS echo chamber” is bearing fruit!

Be careful what you wish for, however. Because while those in municipal government, security or the defence sector are very familiar with GIS analysis or at least the value of maps and situational awareness. As geospatial innovators and strategists, we cannot rely on our new markets having the same intrinsic knowledge of what our chosen toolkit can offer. This discussion is really a deeper and more focused dive into the fallacy of obviousness.

In the last six months, I have been asked about the use of geospatial in non-traditional geospatial markets a number of times: insurance, banking, or consumer goods, for instance. These are wonderful discussions; I love the process of technology discovery and market exploration. For me, these discussions are adventurous and interesting: one of the forms of entrepreneurism I enjoy the most.

Lets talk through your inchoate demand* by listening hard to your experiences and identifying places where technology could provide scale, accuracy or time advantages.

*Yes, I know literally no one else uses that word. Please humour me.

At Sparkgeo, we more often than not use our network to solve problems. We do not need to build technology that already exists. That would be both disingenuous to our partners and a waste of our time. However, we often find ourselves gluing technologies together because rarely is a customer workflow satisfied by a single product, tool, or data source. But before we get close to solving problems, we help this new breed of geospatially-curious organizations understand what geospatial is and how they should think strategically about the subject.

A strategy for the unknown

This is what we are asking of new participants: to take a leap of faith in the use of geospatial to address a workflow they were undertaking in some other manner previously. In many regards, this is completely unreasonable. But, if we develop a method by which to experiment and innovate, this approach starts to make sense. This conversation can be difficult, and all parties need to be motivated to explore, tuned for adventure and feel safe to be open about possibly embarrassing work practices. In the wrong environment, the dialogue can be circular. In many ways, it is far easier for a services company to commit to an iterative relationship of this sort. Free from the constraints of ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue), it is easy for a services company to engage in a deep, long-term discovery process which may appear operationally irrelevant at first.

A services team is free to ignore the elephant of “license sales” sitting in the corner of a boardroom, knowing that there is deep, long-term value in the discovery conversation and the development of trust. Conversely, letting a software salesperson build your strategy is certainly going to influence the outcome. But then, I would say that. Suffice it to say, we should all check our biases and those with whom we work, especially around strategic activities.

Developing Strategy

Environment. Clearly, the first critical step is building an environment of progressive trust. Creating an environment where executives from well-known and sophisticated brands feel safe enough to talk through potentially embarrassing, archaic technology processes is essential to progress. This environment is linked to trust, integrity, confidence, and professionalism - I will discuss the concept of modern professionalism in a future post.

Build a strategic team. The team necessary for deep geospatial strategic work is a combination of organizational authority, operational knowledge, facilitation expertise and technical depth.

1. Executive ownership

2. Deep operational understanding

3. Consulting expertise

4. Technical expertise

Start the discussion. Sometimes this discussion can start with a geospatial primer; sometimes, it can start with an operational review. Both of these starting points are reasonable and productive. Some content should be provided upfront to shortcut any educational component, but the facilitators should not assume every document was read and understood.

This discussion must be both open-ended and controlled. No one has unlimited time for strategy. Remember: we strategize so we can execute more effectively. Not the other way around. To square this circle, good facilitation, the correct participants, and broad technical knowledge are necessary.

Document, reflect and review. Discussions should be documented automatically by simply recording the meeting. But synthesizing the discussion can add or remove value. This process needs to be carefully managed because, on reflection, some elements can emerge as more important than they felt in the initial discussion.

Additionally, the geospatial team must be so careful not to overly direct a team in a particular technology direction, rendering the discovery process moot. The technologist’s role in this discussion must be played very gently: their words could turn the future of an entire company. With this strategic work comes the responsibility to provide real, experiential advice, not just sales copy.

Strategy is not a time-capsule

When you develop a strategy, you do it through the lens of today. It is very possible that tomorrow that lens will change. So don’t develop your strategy and then bury it in the backyard. While agility may not be the hallmark of many corporations, a geospatial strategy does not need to be etched in stone. If a strategy is linked more to values and processes than to technology stacks, then execution can be separated from the strategy itself. This frees up the strategic team from worrying about technology updates when that should be an operational responsibility. Likewise, this frees the operational team to make the relevant day-to-day decisions they need to, without waiting for a strategic review. A strategy should not be a barrier to execution. The Why can remain while the How evolves.

In the next discussion, we will take a look at what a geospatial strategy can look like and start to think about execution. Remember, strategy is easy, but the execution of that strategy is hard.

Oh hey, we do this work at Sparkgeo. If you need a hand, just shout.