Avoiding the Disruption of Disruptive Technologies

There is much excitement and discussion in the geospatial industry about new “disruptive” technologies. Examples of disruptive technologies that we’ve recently talked about on this blog include cloud data stores such as Google’s Fusion Tables and Microsoft’s Azure; emerging data types like 3D and LiDAR; and the more general Data Formats for the 21st Century.

While these new “disruptive” technologies get many people excited about the possibilities, the same cannot be said for large risk-averse organizations. The last thing a large government or corporation wants is to be disrupted! (…and the good news is they don’t have to be)

The Problem
The problem is not that organizations don’t understand the value of the disruptive technology. The problem is: “How do they get from where they are, to adopting this technology – all while still keeping their systems running?”.

This is a similar dilemma to what we have seen before! Roll the clock back to the introduction of the, at the time, disruptive technology called spatial databases. At that time, spatial data was typically stored in tiled based datasets. The benefits of having seamless datasets was easy to understand and ultimately critical for things like large scale network analysis. The question from organizations was the same back then as now: “How do we get from where we are, to adopting this technology – all while still keeping our systems running?”.

The Solution
The solution now is the same as the solution then. The key to letting organizations painlessly adopt new disruptive technology is to enable them to continue to use their existing tools and workflows while adding new workflows that solve new problems. This enables organizations to gradually phase in the adoption of new technology.

In a nutshell, organizations need a path that is both easy and safe (no pun intended) to ease the transition to new technology. If organizations find this path, then adopting “disruptive” new technology is reduced to a simple value proposition rather than a value-risk proposition.

This is exactly what data interoperability technology is all about – enabling people and organizations to integrate data and move it to wherever they want in a repeatable and reliable fashion.

I think that Niels la Cour from the University of Massachusetts summed it best when he said:

“These [data interoperability] tools have fundamentally changed the way that we view changing our work flows. I think most importantly, we can now look at leaving people using the tools that they are used to, but still harvest that data to include in our enterprise GIS. That way we don’t have to ‘disrupt’ the workflows, we can simply ‘enhance’ the workflow by using FME to harvest that data.”

                – Niels la Cour, University of Massachusetts

So, what do you consider to be today’s disruptive technologies? What are your concerns with adopting them?