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Summary:
This article is the second in a series about “The Location Aware Enterprise.” There is hardly a more striking example of the benefits of the Location Aware Enterprise than what happened in New York City (NYC) during the response and recovery operations for the 9/11 tragedy.During that disaster and emergency response, many organizations - city, regional, state, federal, private and non-profit - pooled their resources and worked together.
Ed.Note:
This is the second in a series of articles on the topic of the
"Location Aware Enterprise" provided by Susan Kalweit and several of
her colleagues at Booz Allen Hamilton.Click here to read the first
one, titled "The
Location Aware Enterprise: An Integrating Business Principle."As discussed in our first article, the implementation of a Location Aware Enterprise leads to improved workforce mobility, effective business integration, improved decision support, and the realization of economic return on investments that extend far beyond the capabilities provided by conventional IT operations.There is hardly a more striking example of the benefits of the Location Aware Enterprise than what happened in New York City (NYC) during the response and recovery operations for the 9/11 tragedy.During that disaster and emergency response, many organizations - city, regional, state, federal, private and non-profit - pooled their resources and worked together.A fundamental underpinning to many of their activities was the ability to quickly acquire and combine spatially enabled data from diverse sources.This capability supported the rapid analysis of information, the swift development of new spatially oriented applications, and the sharing over the web of highly informative maps with the general public.This underpinning, which can be described as "geospatially enabled enterprise data integration" is a critical operational component of the Location Aware Enterprise.
The power of map and data combinations: The response to the 9/11 World Trade Center attack
- The imagery and features
of NYCMAP were
combined with water, sewer, subway, electric, gas and
telecommunications
infrastructure layers to deal with massive utility outages.Mapping
efforts
supported collaborative field operations between utility companies and
government agencies.
- Architectural and
engineering drawings
of the World Trade Center, particularly of basement and foundation
layers were
registered to NYCMAP, combined with utility data, and used at first to
support
the efforts of firefighters and federal Urban Search and Rescue (USAR)
personnel to hunt for survivors, and then to assist in safe clearance
of debris
from the disaster site.
- Building data was put on
portable
computers and used to standardize the capture of multiple inspection
operations
that allowed a comprehensive view of each of the hundreds of buildings
affected
by the disaster.
- Site maps, base maps,
state oil storage
information, and daily remote sensing flights identified the location
of
hotspots and underground fires at the disaster scene to help direct
firefighting efforts and to help safeguard workers.
How do we establish the geospatially enabled underpinning?
- Organization Design and
Change Management - to facilitate the
emergence of the Location Aware Enterprise, organizational architecture
must be examined and optimized, including corporate/government culture,
work processes, product/service portfolio and staffing.Also to be
studied are current IT and GIS applications, data assets, and
technology infrastructure.Emerging from these reviews will be an
enhanced organizational design as well as the identification of
opportunities to be realized once the enterprise is more fully
spatially oriented and enabled.
- Information
architecture - defines data essential
to supporting business processes including the foundation layers of
spatial information required by the Location Aware Enterprise.By
revealing data inventories through a metadata dictionary, information
available for integration can be more easily identified.Also to be
defined are the standards and formats for data exchange across the
enterprise.
- Enterprise Architecture - is the blueprint for
building the hardware/software infrastructure and integrating it with
the business processes ensuring that data and applications are
accessible and usable across all offices and organizations.
