You Say You Want A Revolution?

November 30, 2011 - By Eric Gakstatter

After last week’s column, “Technology: Friend or Foe?”, I received a bit of mail. Usually when I write about technology wiggling its way into our lives, the mail I receive is from readers who are apprehensive, concerned, and even frightened of the paradigm shift we are experiencing and going to experience in our lives at the hands of the digital revolution.

If you think about it, the past 30+ years (1980-2011) really dwarfs the previous 30 year period (1950-1980) in terms of lifestyle changes. With the exception of transportation (automobile/air travel) and some medical advancement, the 1950-1980 period was relatively static and stable. It was commonplace for people to work for the same company for 30 years and retire. In fact, you could even wind the clock back another 10 years to 1940 and not see a drastic change, although World War II was a major focus in the 1940s and did challenge the stability of day-to-day family lifestyles.

However, the lifestyle changes we have gone through in the past 30 years (even the past 15 years) have been radical. Thanks to the Internet, I haven’t had to commute to an office in more than 10 years. I’m constantly connected to my family, friends and work colleagues with my mobile phone via talk, text, or email. Sometimes, I will go months without writing a physical check to pay a bill.

The upside is that we are spending less time on mindless “busy work.” Growing up, I recall watching my parents spend a full evening going through canceled checks and bank statements in order to balance their checkbooks. I recall my father making a trip to the bank on Friday afternoon to withdraw cash for the weekend activities (no ATMs). I recall trading a $10 bill for a roll of quarters at the bank in order to make a long distance telephone call back home during my military service days. Back then, there were telephone booths at nearly every street corner. When’s the last time you remember seeing a telephone booth?

These lifestyle changes are the result of the digital revolution…and it’s just beginning.

Following is a great blog post from marketing guru Seth Godin called Pre Digital:

A brief visit to the emergency room last month reminded me of what an organization that’s pre-digital is like. Six people doing bureaucratic tasks and screening that are artifacts of a paper universe, all in the service of one doctor (and the need to get paid and not get sued). A 90-minute experience so we could see a doctor for ninety seconds.

Wasteful and even dangerous.

Imagine what this is like in a fully digital environment instead. Of course, they’d know everything about your medical history and payment ability from a quick ID scan at the entrance. And you’d know the doctor’s availability before you even walked in, and you would have been shuttled to the urgent care center down the street if there was an uneven load this early in the morning. No questions to guess at the answer (last tetanus shot? Allergies to medications?) because the answers would be known. The drive to the pharmacy might be eliminated, or perhaps the waiting time would be shortened. If this accident or illness is trending, effecting more of the population, we’d know that right away and be able to prevent more of it… Triage would be more efficient as well. The entire process might take ten minutes, with a far better outcome.

School is pre-digital. Elections. Most of what you do in your job. Even shopping. The vestiges of a reliance on geography, lack of information, poor interpersonal connections and group connection (all hallmarks of the pre-digital age) are everywhere.

Perhaps the most critical thing you can say of a typical institution: “That place is pre-digital.”

All a way of saying that this is just the beginning, the very beginning, of the transformation of our lives.

Geospatial technology is in the same place. We are being teased with digital geography (GIS), but this is only the initial adoption wave. There is a geography component in nearly every part of our day-to-day lives. The following image captures the adoption of geospatial technology. We are clearly still in the “GIS Professional” part of the curve, and arguably entering the “Application Users” era and clearly on our way to mainstream “Society” adoption.

Esri International User Conference

I wrote a column late last year, “Will We Be a Billion Times More Geospatially Intelligent in Thirty Years?” The premise behind it is that geospatial technology will grow exponentially instead of linearly.

Red = Linear Growth, Blue = Cubic Growth, Green = Exponential Growth (Source: Wikipedia)

In essence, if you follow the linear model (red line), technology will progress only 30 steps in the next 30 years. With exponential growth (green line), technology will progress a billion times in the next 30 years.

How much paper are you pushing (pre-digital)? How much inefficiency is in your organization because of a lack of information or geographic (location) awareness? Location awareness isn’t necessarily the location of an outdoor asset (utility pole, manhole, parcel). It could be the location of a document (paper or digital), the location your lymph nodes (medical GIS), or even your key ring.

Thanks, and see you next week.

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