Geographic Information Systems are changing all over the world.
In the past GIS was often used by a small group of specialists
whose job was to solve complex geospatial questions. Today, GIS
is becoming more part of business processes, and the consequence
of this change is that there are many more users with much
higher requirements regarding the availability of GIS services.
This column describes the path from a workgroup to an enterprise
GIS. There are some elementary differences between these two
types of GIS. The first difference is that in an enterprise GIS,
every decision has to be aligned to the strategy of the company.
Moreover, it is not enough to have a small project area without
precise business requirements, for the enterprise needs
solutions that fit for the whole company and are connected to
business processes. The GIS department changes from a service
consumer to a service provider. So you see, service oriented in
the title of this article doesn’t just mean service-oriented
architecture (SOA),