Enabling Everyone to Access and Use GIS

The evolution of ArcGIS to the platform is changing organizations even more profoundly than adoption of GIS on the enterprise level did. It enfranchises the entire organization, breaking down the barriers between workflows, departments, and disciplines. Sharing data and collaboration using geospatial information have become much quicker and simpler. With web maps, applications, and solutions, internal customers can use data from inside and outside the organization without knowing the underlying GIS technology.

One effect of the adoption of cloud/device models for GIS is that the growing connectedness of the world makes the knowledge created through traditional GIS on desktops and servers accessible to a much wider audience. Consequently, rather than limiting the role of the GIS staff in an organization, that role is shifting and expanding into new areas beyond mapping. The work of GIS professionals has never been more important as GIS becomes ubiquitous. They provide the substrate that lets others benefit from GIS.

This platform brings the unique holistic approach of GIS to bear on the formidable problems faced by organizations. GIS has always been a tremendous tool for not only seeing specific aspects of a problem but the problem as a whole in context. Now GIS can be applied to solving problems in all areas more broadly. The result, in the words of Esri president Jack Dangermond, can be "better outcomes for the entire planet."