Does a separate “GIS system” in the company still make sense?

Today, GIS has merged with „Asset management”, „Project management” and increasingly with „Business Intelligence” systems.

But how?

Regardless of what you do: you have an asset, you manage projects on it, and you need reporting.

➡️ If you are a municipal office (or public administration in general), your „asset” is municipal property (plots, roads, trash bins, streetlights, sewage registers, etc.), and your projects include sanitation, lamp replacement, and water system repairs.

➡️ If you are a large industrial plant, you are essentially managing a medium-sized town, but your projects are a bit more complex (investment approvals, property leasing, taxes…).

➡️ If you are a water utility (or manage gas, fiber optic, or power networks), your „assets” are pipes, valves, hydrants, chambers, and pumps, while your projects include network upgrades, connections, cleaning, flushing, inspections, and, most importantly, uninterrupted delivery of water, electricity, gas, or internet.

➡️ If you are a development company (renewable energy, logistics, residential), your asset is the land database (plots), and your projects are all the typically multi-year processes of planning, permitting, construction, and operation.

Managing these projects across multiple IT systems is a waste of money. This is especially evident in companies that are moving processes to Usemaps or are just considering this approach.

An example?

A company building wind farms. Asana for projects, QGIS + PostGIS for GIS. A classic case of „the blind leading the blind.” Everyone works in their own silo, and the only way to exchange data between silos is via Excel sheets or PDF maps. Tasks that should happen automatically take entire days:

🟠 Basic plot suitability analysis. In Usemaps, it’s automatic, and the result stays in the database. In the example above: several hours (the PM sends the plot ID to the GIS specialist, who checks it and returns a PDF report).
🟠 Plot protection report for a cable route. In Usemaps, it’s automatic; in the example above, every change in plot status – or worse, a change in route variant – requires new calculations.
🟠 Repeated analysis of the same data because in the meantime information gets „lost”: someone leaves, someone forgets, or someone cannot find it.

Every change in the project means creating documentation from scratch.

That’s why Usemaps is more than GIS. It’s a single environment where maps, spatial data, tasks, and projects are connected, and information goes into a shared database instead of circulating between files and systems.