The concept of using Usemaps in your company

What’s the deal with Usemaps?

Many companies face problems with data access and circulation. The situation varies slightly depending on the industry, but there are always four horsemen of the apocalypse:

1. Sending source files by e-mail (and losing parts of them, having multiple versions of the same data)
2. Generating reports/maps to PDF (+ sending by e-mail)
3. GIS specialist. ‘We have a GIS specialist and he makes maps for us’ (and are there ‘PowerPoint specialists’ in the company who make presentations and ‘Excel specialists’ who make tables?)
4. Spatial data in spreadsheets

Of course, this does not only apply to spatial data:

1. Sales departments struggle with a lack of consistent information about customers (individual emails, notes stored in salespeople’s heads) and ongoing sales processes. That is why they implement CRM (Client Relation Management) systems.
2. Finance departments struggle with hundreds of Excel spreadsheets containing plans, budgets and expenses. That is why they implement ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) or BI (Business Intelligence) systems.
3. Management boards generate the need to create reports because the mess is such that nothing can be seen. BI (Business Intelligence) systems also help here.

In companies where working with maps is essential (or, in other words, where company processes require knowledge derived from access to maps/spatial data):

• property sector
• renewable energy industry
• network infrastructure industry
• and many others

A system is also needed that will allow managers to organise the correct processes related to data access. A GIS system.

What is a GIS system?

Is QGIS sufficient on its own?

No. Because QGIS is the equivalent of Excel from the previous examples?

Is access to public geoportals sufficient?

No. Because they are equivalent to the static reports from the previous examples.

So what is needed?

1. Just as processes in the sales department are built on CRM systems (salespeople add customers, meeting notes, reminders about upcoming meetings, while managers build, analyse and modify sales funnels, and the management has access to sales summaries broken down by product categories, salespeople, etc.),
2. Just as finance departments are built on ERP (invoices are issued in the tool based on uniform standards, depreciation is monitored, sales reports are generated automatically).

Therefore, processes requiring access to knowledge derived from spatial data should be built around GIS-class systems:

• the appropriate persons manage the data (adding new water connections, adding information about analysed plots, editing the status of investments)
• other people use this data (investment planning, collecting appropriate materials to repair network failures, planning cable access from the nearest power supply point)
• Others monitor and make strategic decisions (starting a given investment, preventive repair of pipes which, according to the failure report, break after 30 years of installation).

This is where Usemaps comes in. It is a system that allows you to build processes that cannot be designed based on QGIS and geoportals.

We have perfected this, for example, in land banks, where some people add data, others evaluate it, and still others make decisions. Notifications and reports appear at each of these stages. Ultimately, using a tool such as Usemaps, we can model processes in which many (often unfamiliar) people can work on the same set of data.