Customer Reviews

GIS for Business and Service Planning

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It's a very good book with many interesting information about geomarketing.
However, it's version its not recent... It would be interesting having some examples aplied to recent times.

However it still very interesting to buy.

As an industry, GIS often seems to be in search of a niche. While most people can easily be convinced that at least some components of GIS would be helpful in their business, only a small number actually use it effectively. Clearly, a large part of the problem is lack of knowledge concerning how to implement it. This book is a good place to start on the journey to profitable use of what is a set of very effective tools.
Designed to appeal to those at the management level, technical jargon is kept to a minimum. Although specific cases are mentioned, the emphasis is on an explanation of strategy rather than implementation details. One very good aspect is the lack of hype. While there are well-known cases of substantial benefits being reaped when a GIS tool was used, most of those mentioned here concern improvements that are a single digit percentage. The limitations of GIS are also readily acknowledged. Some of the inherent inaccuracies in the collection and processing of data, such as the census, are explained in detail. This includes the deliberate ones introduced as a response to legally mandated privacy concerns.
Contributor Stan Openshaw makes points in chapter seven that are of fundamental interest to geographers and GIS professionals. The following two quotes

"Geographers have been particularly slow to appreciate the commercial relevance and monetary value of many basic geographical analysis and modeling skills."

"Seemingly few geographers know much or anything about the needs of marketers and they are thus unable to be of much assistance even if they wished to be."

point out a fundamental rule of knowledge transfer, namely that new business expertise is more often pushed out than pulled in. Therefore, it is the responsibility of all GIS professionals to inform and educate potential users of the value of the wide range of GIS tools. Waiting for the prospects to learn this on their own is unrealistic. For this reason, there is also much here to interest the GIS professional.
Most of the case studies are European, with an emphasis on the United Kingdom. While this does not change the validity, some in the United States may question the usefulness of decisions made in a European context. However, it does point out some of the inherent strengths of GIS, in that the use is in most cases independent of the cultural foundation of the data. It was very interesting for this reviewer to learn that the most widely used polygon for GIS related business applications in Europe is also the postal code. While governments go to great lengths to create the polygons used for the census, the majority of business applications find them of lesser significance compared to how the mail is sorted. Perhaps there will be a movement in the future to consolidate the census and postal polygons wherever possible. It seems logical that governments would also find some efficiency benefits to such a change.
With much to offer both the GIS professional wishing to make inroads into business and the business planner looking for a better bottom line, this is a book that both groups can read to good effect. Since it is clear that each has a lot of offer, there is no better time. And in the current intensively competitive business climate, for the use of GIS may be an act of survival