What is GIS software used for?

This thought was prompted by an article in this week’s GISCafé newsletter. North Somerset Council have purchased software to help them ‘deliver services from the back office to the customer’.

Now, using the previous definitions of Geographic Information, I can understand that local governments would be a user of GI. I can think of a number of instances where a local authority is involved with location – roads, housing, school catchment areas, refuse collection, council tax etc. We at the AGI have a number of local authorities among our membership, though it has to be said there are even more local authorities who are not members and a major task for us this year is to persuade all local authorities of the benefits of membership of the AGI.

But back to North Somerset Council, who are indeed members of the AGI. They state that they purchased WebMap software in order to ‘deliver back office functions using front office staff’. Now I don’t exactly know what this means. Their problem as I understand it was an inaccurate database with many duplications and no unique referencing system. The software purchased was, I believe, a gazetteer management system which would allow them to clean and match the gazetteer data. They used their in-house GIS team to do this with the software purchased.

Now I don’t begin to understand yet exactly what this software does, but if the end product is an accurate database which can match assets with council tax, waste services, planning etc. then I can see the advantage. And it appears that they have delivered this information to their front office staff via an intranet site and to the public via their internet site.
They claim they can deliver more integration, more functionality and better reporting. And finally they say that staff and public are beginning to realise the value of GIS.

Except that the layman does not presumably realise that it is GIS that is delivering these benefits. And this is still the concept that I am trying to understand. It will take me some time before I understand more about what GIS software actually does and how it does it. For now it is enough for me to know that GIS software can significantly improve the quality and availability of data.

And it is important for me to realise this because I suspect that for the take-up of the technology to increase within local authorities throughout the land, there will be a number of non-geographers, particularly finance guys, within those local authorities who will need to be persuaded that the benefits outweigh the costs.