In an information age, and in the midst of a technology revolution, we are constantly bombarded by messages about innovation. Innovation is a popular and rather overused marketing term but what does it actually mean? Any product is now deemed to be innovative just by being new to the market.

But to truly be innovative, something has to be more than just an improvement on the status quo. It might be a combination of two ideas in a novel way, or perhaps a totally new idea. Either way, to qualify as truly innovative, it must do something that was not previously possible.

Some great examples that fit the criteria are Google’s car that can drive itself, Wikipedia’s encyclopaedia that is written by anyone and everyone, and in 1861 when predicting the future became possible with the first Weather Forecast.

Some innovations have created entirely new spaces in the market, like weather forecasting and the internet. Others, such as Wikipedia, digital cameras and the Kindle, have severely disrupted the market and produced significant casualties.

The Encyclopaedia Britannica, plunged from market leader to out of business in just 10 years. It simply couldn't compete with Wikipedia's continual updates and responsiveness to user interests. Kodak, the first name in photography, invented the digital camera but didn't market it for fear of cannibalising its own film business. They filed for bankruptcy in 2013. 

Doing something that is currently not possible is very hard to visualise. This means that when it happens it comes out of the blue and is hard to compete with. For the same reason the innovator also finds it difficult to bridge the initial scepticism of the public. 

Innovation often happens outside of a product's home industry. Google's self-drive car isn't a product of the auto industry; neither is the Tesla electric vehicle. Regulations and standards within any given industry are usually loaded with assumptions from the status quo that inhibit change. Check out the google steering wheel issue. From outside of the industry thinking is freed up. A point worth noting is that mostly your customers are outside of your industry.

Genuine innovation, such as Google's self-drive car, Uber's new business model for taxis, or the many of the advances in the field of genetics, often exists in spaces where legislative frameworks and codes of ethics either don't exist or can be 'stretched' to suit market disruptors and their creations. 

Alex St John, the former Microsoft guru now based in NZ, has very clear views on innovation. He believes that it is only failure or disaster that drives innovation, and that nobody innovates voluntarily.

Many in the Tech industry are noticing an apparent fatigue and resistance to change. In a way it's similar to Toffler's predicted information overload. But whereas Toffler predicted that it would result in physiological and societal responses to stress, what is starting to be noticed is people’s defence mechanisms to rapid change itself. 

To learn a new technology requires investments of time, effort, thinking and adapting (or as Toffler put it learning, unlearning and relearning). Unless there is a compelling reason to invest in this effort, many people are avoiding what they see as unnecessary change. 

Innovation causes change. Change can be empowering and also a source of stress. People are subconsciously measuring change on this slightly odd set of balance scales and if it tips toward the side of stress they will push back against the change. It’s not a new phenomenon but the rate of change means there is more stress which will result in more push back.

In their day-to-day jobs people are quite efficient in what they do. They won't be motivated to change unless there is a significant benefit, such as being able to do something they can’t do now. This might explain why in an industry such as medicine, in which an incredible array of new technology is now available, an archaic technology like the fax machine is still the standard way of doing B2B.

In addition, any new innovation is likely to be only one step in an integrated process. Introducing the new step not only adds to the level of uptake stress, it may often break the process or require it to be re-engineered. We may stand back and shake our heads at some of the practices that we see going on, but there are perfectly valid psychological and economic reasons as to why they're so ubiquitous.

New designs or changes that will impact or potentially help other people, must either integrate fully and seamlessly, or provide the capability to do something that otherwise can’t be done. And do so faster.

It is important that we budget the time and effort to keep pace and invest in our future as a way to reduce our own stress. Do you want to be the one to fall off the escalator, placing your career or the future success of your employer in jeopardy?

- Bryan Clarke

It's been a warm summer and I've been enjoying the fruits of my labour in the vege garden. I'm fully aware the economic case for growing your own vegetables doesn't really stack up, especially when you factor in the time spent weeding and watering. But I just love being able to pick and serve fresh, homegrown, tasty, pesticide-free meals for family and friends.

I could take the easy route and just purchase veggies from the supermarket, but my feeling is that the primary commercial driver for the supermarket is to stock produce that will sell well because it looks great, rather than because of its flavour or nutritional value.

HELLO, FAAS AND DAAS

But there's a bigger trend than flashy marketing at play with food these days. Given our busy lives and near obsession with convenience, food has increasingly become FaaS (food as a service). The 'service' could mean a packet of varied salad leaves washed, mixed, and ready to eat with a pre-measured and perfectly matched pack of salad dressing. Alternatively, it could be pre-cut veggies sold with the appropriate soup stock and served with a pre-prepared garlic bread. FaaS isn't my cup of tea. Although I'm bucking the trend, I don't mind the extra effort required to serve friends an enjoyable meal.

A friend with similar sensibilities has applied the same logic to his vintage car. When he takes this car on a road trip, not only is he up for a slow trip exposed to the elements, he also fully expects his car to break down every few hundred kilometres.

And guess what - he loves it! That includes getting out on the side of the road to work out what has broken and how to fix it. Since parts aren't readily available for vintage cars, these repairs often require considerable ingenuity, skill, and labour.​​

Until fairly recently, this level of skill was necessary for anyone who wanted to drive. In my parents' day, cars were becoming more ubiquitous but were still relatively 'high needs'. This meant that everyone's dad was a backyard mechanic, and weekends were spent under the car or the bonnet doing preventative maintenance.

That all changed when the Japanese motor industry introduced streamlined manufacturing that focused on reliability and efficiency. Over time, fixing parts was no longer cost effective and the job of a mechanic became that of 'parts replacer'. This trend has continued, with mechanics now becoming diagnostic technicians. Even my relatively unsophisticated car has over 50 sensors, such as those measuring the exhaust for particulates and temperature to provide instant feedback to the carburettor.

Given the current conditions of high reliability and high complexity, drivers have willingly traded in expert knowledge and hands-on daily maintenance for the simple function of travelling from point a to point b.

This trend is now being extended to include even the act of driving itself by means of DaaS (driving as a service). My Google Navigate smart phone app will get me where I need to go, and Google Calendar will let me know when I need to leave to arrive on time. These days cars also routinely come with sensors that keep you firmly in your own lane, and prevent you from reversing into unseen objects. And of course driverless cars are just around the corner with the release of Google's recent prototype.

HAVE WE ARRIVED AT GISAAS YET?

I can't help but notice the similarities between the days before FaaS/DaaS and my own experiences in the early days of GIS. They included hours spent writing fixes for software that didn't work or didn't do what was needed, or data that couldn't be cajoled into participating in a process. Or sometimes it was programming in low level languages such as assembler, or printer languages such as pcl5 or hpgl and writing your own buffer functions. Crikey, those were the days!

So if we look at the NZ geospatial industry in relation to the broad-ranging move towards 'aaS', where are we now and where do we need to be heading? What trends do we need to take heed of and what trends should we be taking the lead on?

The first thing to note with my tongue-in-cheek rendering of DaaS is that it is very geospatial. But it's also significant that these developments in transport are taking place outside and around our industry rather than from within it.

Rather than GISaaS, most industry effort is going into the provision of 'raw materials', for instance data services such as wfs and wfs-t. You can get the data, but it still takes power user skills to add value and achieve what you want to achieve. Using the motor car analogy above, this puts our industry in the 'everyone's dad is a mechanic' stage on the evolutionary growth path.

Some geospatial vendors are starting to provide analysis services, but at this early stage the services are very generic. While they tick the boxes for simplicity, they still lack the statistical robustness required to be reliably valid. One of the hallmarks of 'aaS' services is that the user is isolated from what goes on 'under the hood'. All they're meant to understand is the result that is delivered to them. If it isn't robust or valid the user could be unknowingly making poor decisions.

With a driving directions service, it's very clear to the service provider what the customer needs. It's also very clear to the customer when the results are less than optimal. This is not yet the case with geospatial analysis services, but needs to be. It has long been an issue in our industry that maps of dubious use, untested rigour, and shoddy underlying data continue to be used unchallenged for their reliability, accuracy and meaningfulness. If we aspire to genuine GISaaS, this olde worlde culture needs to change.

Unlike the norm with FaaS (food as a service), we shouldn't be aiming to produce something that looks good but isn't very nutritious. The goal for the geospatial industry is to identify high value, repeatable, fully automatible, fast performing, and most importantly, rigorously reliable services. These can either be ubiquitous, like Google driving directions, or bespoke to meet a niche business need.

It's a trip we're up for. Are you?​

-Bryan Clarke

On one hand we see two giants on the global GIS software and service market joining forces with the integration of some components of Intergraph's computer-aided dispatch system (I/CAD) and ESRI's ArcGIS platform.

On the other hand, Google announced in February its decision to deprecate its Map Engine. Google is generally close-lipped about it, but ESRI was quick off the ranks with a generous offer for Maps Engine customers to transition to ESRI products (which includes software, training and conference attendance for free).

The customers who require carefully-managed, accurate and precise datasets will need to look to transition their business-essential systems to a new home. There are many possible homes aside from ESRI's offering, including many open source platforms, and most will already be on the case with a looming deadline of January 2016.

As the core functionality of Spatial software on offer becomes standard, much like Accounting products offer the same basic solutions. Consequently, it becomes less about what one product can do better than another, and more about how the products can integrate with other core systems, and about the collaboration of organisations who want to share data or processes with each other. Competition is good, as demonstrated by Intergraph building integration to ESRI's platform.

We do still see different approaches taken by customers using different softwares, and the last thing I would want to see is a monopoly. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Many other organisations have data stored in spreadsheets, databases, images, and documents; often relating to a location. For those with accidental, coincidental, unmanaged, or unstructured data, we have and will continue to see location awareness being the trend, with collaboration and integration being the key words. This does not necessitate the detail, or precision of an enterprise GIS; and out-of-the-box thinking and simple linking will achieve a lot.

Can't wait to see what these changes bring, and who we see located next.​

- Bryan Clarke

In the run-up to this year's election, which saw the appearance of Nicky Hager's book Dirty Politics, John Key made the observation that the book's source material was stolen information.

Photo Credit: *sax via Compfight cc

Let's steer clear of any politics and take a closer look at the claim that information could be stolen.

WHAT KIND OF 'THING' IS INFORMATION?

And that's because of one crucial property that turns data into information: context.

Acquiring that information has the more grandiose labels of intelligence or market knowledge. The importance of intelligence when undertaking any sort of business has been recognised for thousands of years. In his 500 BC book The Art of War, Sun Tzu wrote, 'Know your enemy and know yourself and you can fight a thousand battles without disaster'. Those generals who still follow his teachings to the letter rarely or never lose.

Privacy issues have raised their head a number of times in recent years, yet even a cursory look at the legislation reveals that there is a wide gap between what many people consider to be private and the protection that the law provides. When in doubt, it's always worth going back to the source. Examining legislation is now much easier since its publication on the web.

Interestingly, the principles of the Privacy Act are more about ensuring that all practical steps have been taken to ensure accuracy and that the data isn't being misused, rather than protecting information that you as an individual might be sensitive about.

The principles of both publishing and broadcasting have been established now for hundreds of years. Once you distribute a message or idea on the airwaves or in written form, such as in a book, you have authorised the receiver of that message to examine its contents, to make their own interpretation, to draw their own conclusions, and to make their own decisions. Once you have broadcast or published, you have also given away any control over who may hear or read your message or idea.

You may decide to limit who can access your message by adding a security layer, through encoding, or by writing your message in a language that only a segment of the population can read, but these measures do not change the underlying principles of broadcasting and publishing.

What you are reading now is intended to only be available to those who have subscribed to our newsletter, but once it is posted it is 'out there' to be intercepted, forwarded, cut and pasted, blogged and indexed by Google. Not only that, long before it was published in the newsletter, it was being broadcast over WiFi as it was being written, and saved to the cloud. That means it was readily accessible for anyone with the means to do so. This was a decision and a risk that we were prepared to take in creating this information.

And then there is all the data that we allow to be harvested every time we use a website, on any smartphone app where we have enabled location services, on call logs, in image galleries, etc. The big data approach to harvesting data, and the trends that can be inferred from that data, again challenge the idea that our activities, thoughts and conversations are private. Again, whether that's a problem or not comes down to how the harvesters use the data and the context within which it is used.

IT'S ALL ABOUT CONTEXT

Which brings us back to context. One definition of information is 'data in context'. So what is that context? To transform data into information, you need to have a problem that requires a solution. You also need an audience to receive the information, and someone who is going to make a decision based on the information to address the problem.

The final element of context is the difference it will make within its context. Information should represent the difference between the situation that exists and the outcome that is desired. It should also represent the difference that it will make (to society, to the environment, to the bottom line, to product quality, to efficiency. etc.) when decisions are made based upon the information to address the problem that has been identified.

THE IMPLICATIONS FOR GIS

As geospatial professionals, that's where we come in. When we get asked to make a map, or undertake some geospatial analysis, how often do we sit down and define the problem to be solved, identify who the decision maker is, or what decision is that they need to make? And how often do we ensure that our work is geared to making that difference in explicit terms? To do so at the early stages of every project ensures that our work is as effective as it can be, and gets the right results out the first time, without rework.

Formatting of the final data should be done in such a way that the decision appears obvious to the decision maker. This requires the geospatial professional to have produced the output reliably (i.e., so it is statistically beyond challenge), and ethically, so the decision maker is presented with objective information rather than with a preferred slant of the author. You can always tell when you have created good information because it is clear, simple and compelling.

The property of information that we love the best is that the world works far more effectively when information is shared. Great effort (not to mention government policy both here and abroad) is being directed at making data and information as accessible and shareable as possible. When we work effectively and collaboratively with common data to make the world a better place, we know that the context for how the data is being used is the right one.

Given this context, the idea that information could be stolen doesn't really seem to fit very well.