in the standard production line. They had a clear man
date. The sale of maps to the public was usually not seen
as a high priority. The production was funded from
governmental budgets primarily for military and develop
ment, reconstruction or administrative purposes with a
reasonably captive clientele.
Relevant Characteristics of
Geo-information Technology
In a McLuhanesque sense then these generic characte
ristics of the combination of computer, communication,
and process technologies, have similar impacts on orga
nizations independent of what the organization is about.
Airphot
Productivity
Data capture
Operational
image processing
techniques
Improved
adjust progr's
4 computers
Carto
repro
igraphy
Schut
Ac ke r m a n
Artificial
negatives
Improved
electronic
reproduction
Computer
assisted
cartography
1945
1967
Investments
1989
Fig. 2. Pattern of productivity improvement;
data capture versus cartography.
The main preoccupation of a senior manager in those
days was to improve the quality and efficiency of the
production lines, particular attention was being paid to
positional quality. They had to make sure staff was
trained for the many specializations and working to well
defined specifications, and that the budgets continued to
come in. Fig. 2 shows some of the key areas in the im
provement of efficiency of map production. These organi
zations were in fact highly specialized monopolies. Very
few non-governmental organizations could afford to set
up a surveying and mapping shop in order to compete
with a national topographical survey organization. I do not
know how central agencies in the governments in Europe
saw these mapping organizations but in Canada they
were seen as almost impregnable fortresses, highly
specialized and due to a lack of visible measurement of
their effectiveness largely considered unaccountable.
This became an issue in 1973, after the first oil crisis,
when the first major efforts began to curtail governmental
spending and from which surveying and mapping agen
cies of course could not be excluded. The siege was on
and as Walter Smith used to say:Eventually it will come
to us all!".
Roughly at that time, i.e. the mid 1970s, major changes
began to occur in our societies, which were and still are
directly related to the development and miniaturization of
computers combined with communication technology,
and instantaneous worldwide communication of text,
sound and visual images. In the late sixties and early
seventies, people like Marshall McLuhan had speculated
on the impact of those technologies. He in particular saw
clearly that the technologies themselves had a larger
impact upon the society than their contents. In order to
address this in our surveying and mapping world I should
like to focus on three characteristics of this combination
of technologies which have particularly affected our
organizations, the way we do business, produce maps,
do surveys, deal with client organizations and financing,
etc.
It is useful to keep this in mind because it allows us to
study the effects on other organizations and learn some
thing. Geo-information Technology (GT) is an example of
the combination of these technologies and we shall
consider some of the impacts of these characteristics on
surveys and mapping organizations. The most fundamen
tal characteristics include integration, decentralization
and customization.
Integration
The impact of integration could be illustrated as follows.
In the world of analogue technology, atlas cartography
includes about 50 to 70 identifiable steps from the data
collection stage to the distributed map. Within this, a
dozen or so technical specialists contribute to the pro
duction process. None of these specialists saw the
completed map until many months later. This process
required an hierarchical organization with supervisors to
co-ordinate the production process and assure quality
control. In a GT-environment, the production process is
integrated and the number of steps is reduced to less
than twelve. After the data are acquired, map production
is interactively controlled in one process to plate-ready
negatives, completely controlled by a cartographer/geo
grapher and the result may be available within days or
hours. This does not require the same supervisory hier
archy, and the role of the supervisor changes more to a
coach than a disciplinarian and checker. The quality
assurance and control process as well as the levels of
responsibility, accountability and authority of staff all
change. The organization becomes flatter. This aspect
has serious consequences for the introduction of this
technology into an organization because there may be a
lot of resistance to this change if supervisors feel they will
loose their status or even their jobs. An example in our
daily lives of this type of production integration is desktop
publishing.
Examples of the integration of information itself include
management information and decision support systems
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