Denis Roose

Customizing GIS for Economic Development

Abstract

Private and public economic development organizations are rushing to adopt multimedia GIS systems. GIS has proven to be very useful in asset management, site selection and marketing, suitability analysis, policy impact analysis...

This paper will first review the benefits of GIS systems for industrial site selection and marketing from the points of view of the GIS professional, the economic developer and corporate client.

Next, the author will illustrate why application-oriented GIS systems are needed to fully reap the benefits of GIS. Selecting the right tools to build such systems is not trivial. The pros and cons of different Esri³ products will be described.

Finally, the paper will discuss the author's experience designing such system using the ArcView³ and Visual Basic³ software.


I - Introduction

A- Economic Development: What Is It Anyway?

Like GIS (Geographic Information Systems), economic development is a term that applies to a variety of activities. Economic developers from the public sector usually see it as the process of expanding economic activity in their community in order to reach the community's economic and societal goals 1. Generally, the public sector economic developers aim at enhancing the quality of life for all people in their territories through employment opportunities and the expansion of economic and tax bases.

When the multiplier effect is taken into consideration, new manufacturing jobs create over three times as much return to the local economy as do service jobs: $500,000 versus $150,000 on average 2. This explains why many economic development organizations target the manufacturing sector heavily. However, it is not to say that other economic development strategies may not be more appropriate for a specific area. For example, such strategies may involved targeting tourism, software development, back offices or health care services. Industrial development will be the focus of this paper and is referenced as economic development..

Public economic developers often work very closely with their private counterparts in the utility, transportation and telecommunication industries. Companies in those industries benefit from economic growth through the increased sale of their company's products and services.

Economic development involves a lot of other players: location consultants, engineering firms, lawyers, lawmakers, planners, commercial real estate agents, the society as a whole and, obviously, the expanding or relocating companies. Unless otherwise mentioned, this paper takes the perspective of an economic developer.

B- The Many Uses of GIS for Economic Development

Economic developers market a territory. Their business is centered on location, location, location. GIS has proven to be very useful in asset management, suitability analysis, policy making and impact analysis, site selection and marketing, etc.

1. Asset Management

GIS is be used to:

Many relocating or expanding companies have short product cycles and therefore cannot take the time to build facilities from the ground up. Therefore, they often focus exclusively on existing buildings. Communities without available or appropriate buildings find themselves at a strong disadvantage. To remedy to the situation, they may build a facility before finding a buyer or tenant. This is a risky but sometimes necessary strategy. Even when buildings are well designed and are expandable, they may stay on the market for years if they are not well located. GIS can help reduce this risk by selecting the right location.

2. Suitability Analysis

GIS is used to find:

3. Policy Making and Impact Analysis

GIS has helped lawmakers:

4. Site Selection and Marketing

Site selection and marketing is probably the economic development GIS application with the fastest return on investment. In this case, GIS is used to inventory, organize, analyze and present economic development data to retain or attract companies into an area.

C- The Benefits of GIS in Industrial Site Selection and Marketing

1. The Information Technology Perspective

Today, multimedia GIS is the best technology to deal with eclectic and location-based site selection data. It offers the benefits of traditional database and multimedia systems while adding powerful spatial, analytical, map publishing and data integration capabilities. The releases of Internet map servers strengthen its leading position.

2. The Economic Developer's Perspective

Using GIS, economic developers gain a competitive edge by:

3. The Corporate Executive's Perspective

Due to restructuring, few companies have corporate real estate executives. The tasks that were traditionally assigned to them have been distributed among other executives and passed to lower levels of management. Yet, a large proportion of a company's assets remains tied to real estate. A typical executive in charge of the site selection is overworked and has never dealt with a major relocation or expansion before. He/She is willing to listen to good advice and often hires a consultant to help in the process.

GIS gives economic developers the chance to become trusted advisors to the site selection team as well. Not only does it provide needed information but it inspires confidence in a community's responsiveness and professionalism... a community to do business with.

Companies gain from an economic development GIS because:

As a direct result, the company research team has an easier job justifying the community with a GIS to its executives and board of directors.

 

II - The Need for an Application-Oriented GIS

A typical site selection involves complex tabular queries and spatial (theme-on-theme) analyses. This complexity makes it next to impossible to use generic GIS systems as powerful real-time analytical demonstration tools. Generic GIS are best used by GIS specialists in the "back office". Their major strength for economic development is their flexibility.

Application-oriented GIS systems should be accessible to every economic developer. They have important characteristics missing in generic GIS systems:

Both systems offer integrated multimedia features, including the capability to play video and sound.

 

III - Selecting the Right GIS Programming Environment

A- Goals and Selection

In addition to achieving the benefits of application-oriented GIS software described above, EDgeTech America, Inc. wanted to find a development environment that:

ArcView GIS from Esri was selected in April 1995. Esri has a dominant presence in governments and utility companies. Both are major players in the economic development game and create a lot of GIS data. EDgeTech personnel knew the Esri corporation for having worked with it for years and felt that it offered the most scalable line of products and long term potential.

At the time, the ArcView had just been fundamentally reengineered. This presented both an opportunity and a challenge. It was the first time Esri was offering a $1000 customizable PC-based product but it was a new and unproven software. It also lacked an important functionality for developing application-oriented GIS systems: a form creation capability.

Microsoft Visual Basic (VB) was selected as the form creation engine even though EDgeTech would have liked to take advantage of ArcView multiplatform capabilities. A widely accepted crossplatform Rapid Development Tool (RAD) simply could not be found! In addition, a subset of VB, Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) was on its way to becoming the cross-vendor customization tool. It is now supported by most Office 97 applications and has been licensed to over 40 vendors who are going to make their own application customizable with VBA. This provides the long-awaited opportunity for EDgeTech and other system integrators to invest into, and use, a single programming language to perform "all" our desktop work.

The lost in cross-platform compatibility is smaller than the advantages of cross-Office Suite and multi-desktop-vendor support. Microsoft and Esri may eventually port both VB and ArcView GIS to the Digital NT platform, allowing for a high-end hardware port of our software, EDgeMaker. However, most economic developers would not mind being limited to personal computers. They already use them and PCs are only getting better, faster and cheaper.

B- A Moving Target

In March 1996, Esri announced MapObjects, a collection of 32-bit OCX map controls that has the following advantages over ArcView:

However, MapObjects 1.0 did not support ArcInfo coverages, which was an absolute requirement. MapObjects 1.1 released earlier this year does support this file format. It still does not support as many other data types as ArcView GIS.

Even though EDgeMaker was a year into ArcView/VB development, it could have retain a lot of its VB code had EDgeTech decided to switch to MapObjects. The company didn't because it felt that ArcView was offering something more important: the ability to switch between an application-oriented GIS interface and a toolbox GIS interface. Such applications offers:

Since 1995 or even March 1996, the Internet has changed the computer landscape quite a bit. Today, a hybrid ArcView/VB application is not web-friendly because it is made of two applications running in parallel. It is hard (but not impossible) to publish both of them on the web in a synchronized manner. Esri's reengineering of its software line in "wrapable" components should solve this problem. As of this writing in March 1997, several "active content" web technologies are vying from dominance: Java, JavaScript, ActiveX and more recently Dynamic HTML. To wait for the Internet dust to settle down while Esri is reengineering its products may not be a bad strategy in the long run.

 

IV - Lessons Learned

A- Steep Learning Curve

Migrating down from a UNIXÆ-based ArcInfo GIS to a WindowsÆ-based ArcView/Visual Basic environment requires a lot of learning:

Learning takes time. Having no previous experience makes it hard to estimate release dates. So it may be smart to think small at first!

B- ArcView GIS Is Site-Centric

ArcView GIS has a built-in Project Repair utility that cannot be bypassed or customized by programmers and is not powerful enough to distribute an application to clients with various data sets. It detects missing database files but does not check for existence of fields. This makes it hard for programmers to distribute site-independent application-oriented projects as such project files may not include any reference to data. The work around is to define global variables from a startup project containing only code and then open the ArcView project with which the user will interact.

C- It Gets Very Technical

We found out that in order to keep ArcView GIS and Visual Basic acting as a single application, we needed to get involved with Dynamic Data Exchange and Windows 32-bit API. If one wants to support Window 3.x, one will also have to learn the Windows 16-bit API.

D- Taking a New Software to Its Limits

It took two man-years to migrate from a UNIX ArcInfo environment and to develop the PC-based EDgeMaker for ArcView GIS. At least 35% of that time was devoted to finding workarounds to ArcView limitations and bugs. Being on ArcView's bleeding edge has its rewards though! EDgeMaker is the first commercially available multimedia GIS designed specifically for industrial site selection analysis and marketing.

 

V - Conclusion

The impact of large plants on the local economy can run in the billions of dollars. Therefore if GIS helps tilt the decision towards locating one of these plants in your area, your whole GIS system and years of hard work are paid at once.

An application-oriented (or hybrid) multimedia GIS is needed to take full advantage of GIS in industrial site selection

A careful analysis of the advantages and disadvantages between the ArcView and MapObjects alternatives is needed before deciding which development environment to choose. The choice is not obvious and should be based on your customers' needs, your development philosophy and your experience.

Allowing users to benefit from both an application-oriented GIS and a toolbox GIS by switching interfaces has proven very powerful. Using ArcView GIS for that purpose is cost effective.

Esri new component approach and alignment with industry standards is very promising, particularly the integration of ArcView with other Windows applications, including VB. Support for Object Linking and Embedding (OLE/ActiveX) would also be nice. At the same time, the author hopes that the transition will be smooth and the new software will be of high quality.

Finally, EDgeTech's experience with EDgeMaker can be summarized in one sentence! It is a lot of work to make something look simple!


©1997 EDgeTech America, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

EDgeMaker, www.edgetech-us.com, @edgetech-us.com, the EDGE and EDge words are trademarks of EDgeTech America, Inc. Esri, ArcView, ArcInfo, MapObjects are registered trademarks of Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc.

EDgeTech America, Inc. is an Esri Business Partner.


References

1 Richard Preston, C.E.D., FM, HLM. 1993. "Principles of Total Community Development", Practicing Economic Development. AEDC, Rosemont, IL. Second Edition Back To Text

2 James A. Schriner. "15 Mistakes to Avoid in Site Selection", Expansion Management 1995 Atlas & Guide. Volume 10, Number 4. New Hope Communications, Overland Park, KS. Back To Text


Denis Roose, President
EDgeTech America, Inc.
Tel. 888-EDgeTech (888-334-3832)
E-Mail: droose@edgetech-us.com
Web: www.edgetech-us.com