Locatum - living geospatial with you
I wrote much of this some time ago when the website first emerged from stealth mode but having been somewhat busy in the mean time, waited til a moment of pause to conclude.
Never has there been a time when geography, geographical information and geospatial tools and thinking has been further from leather elbow pads and so much part of ‘the Zeitgeist’ but more importantly, to a prosperous, healthy and sustainable future.. Climate change and Covid are but two vehicles serving to illustrate and illuminate this centrality, albeit obliquely through the constant hum of “local”, “regional”, “national” and “planetary” framing.
Yet the community of practitioners with the greatest understanding and appreciation of the role, utility and value of the data, tools, techniques that enable this framing have laboured under an often self-imposed set of technocratic and language constraints. Not that we haven’t tried to break it and been enabled in that endeavour by the democratisation of location by the likes of Google Maps/Earth, Open Street Map, in-car navigation, foursquare (remember check-ins!) and, of course, for 60% of the planet, those “phones” that are our constant companion. The AGI has been ploughing that furrow for 30+ years too and was among the first to welcome the formation of the Geospatial Commission and to take that “geospatial moment” to build and sustain momentum.
A slide at ESRI UC this year suggested over 60% of organisations don’t have a geospatial strategy. Digital transformation of processes and whole industries continues at pace, enabled upstream by technology adoption such as IoT and EO and by the cloud for storage, processing, analytics, collaboration and communication. A common characteristic of these enabling tools is not just the “big data” that they generate but that nearly every byte has a spatial dimension or tag of some kind. Ignoring or overlooking this lens is to miss the opportunities it affords, for improved operations, enhanced customer engagement, supply chain insights or product and service development. Purely on its own terms or more likely through integration with other data sets, internal or third party, the latent asset value goes unrecognised without strategic acknowledgement and action.
Geospatial thinking has its origins in the natural and built environments, “mapping” the environment, documenting change, recording events, providing context for insight and action. As the variety, granularity and cadence of the data has expanded thanks to the fall in cost and size of the upstream data capture and the capabilities of the tools, technologies and talent that enable its use, so has the opportunity. While the consumer world has been focused on using location to support profiling and behavioural surplus and drive advertising spend, the land and property, asset management, energy and infrastructure, transport and logistics and the insurance and financial services sectors are among those where there are more direct opportunities to leverage location enabled data assets.
As the last week of #geocom20 has once again evidenced (this now being November) the fine and age-old art of story-telling, of compelling narratives that put resolution of your challenges, ambitions and problems at their heart help present those opportunities in an accessible way, enabling change and adoption.
Locatum is part of that endeavour - to enable organisations to exploit the power of place to their advantage. Strategy, sounding board, programme, due diligence, product development, growth? One-off, interim, retained, project based? Let’s have a conversation.