GIS has demonstrated real business value, or return on investment (ROI). During the last 30 years companies, agencies, academic institutions, and governments worldwide have implemented GIS programs to take advantage of these benefits.
See how users in different industries and disciplines have used GIS effectively to solve problems and improve processes. Learn best practices from peers in your industry and get ideas on how you can implement GIS in your organization or community.
Business:
Banking
Financial analysts employ GIS for targeting their markets by visualizing service needs. Companies including Metropolitan Life and Chase Manhattan Bank rely on GIS software to help them improve operational excellence and profitability. 
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Insurance
Many insurance companies have made GIS a central component of their business, using it to visualize, analyze, and distribute risk. Companies such as CHUBB Insurance use GIS software for portfolio risk management. Learn more.
Logistics
Logistics management requires planning the distribution fleet's activities, route locations, and schedules. Argentina's telephone company, Grupo Telefónica, uses the GIS logistics routing solution shown to the right to increase the number of daily deliveries without increasing resources. Learn more.
Media
GIS is used by media bureaus for everything from analyzing circulation and attracting advertisers to creating the maps used in the material itself. The Associated Press (AP), USA TODAY, and National Geographic Society use GIS software to create accurate maps quickly for magazines, newspapers, and online news services. GIS maps can help the media keep the public informed about street closures or openings and other emergency services, as in this map of lower Manhattan from the AP. Learn more.
Real Estate
From map-based contact management to sophisticated investment analysis in large real estate investment trusts, real estate agencies rely heavily on electronic mapping. Many realtors have found great success in using the Internet to market properties. Companies such as SSR Realty Advisors, Inc. use GIS in commercial real estate, while REALTOR.com uses GIS to bring maps online to 1.2 million people shopping for a new home. Learn more.
Retail Business
Businesses maintain information about sales, customers, inventory, demographic profiles, and mailing lists, all of which have geographic locations. Therefore, business managers, marketing strategists, financial analysts, and professional planners increasingly rely on GIS to organize, analyze, and present their business data.
Companies such as Sears have saved millions of dollars by managing deliveries with GIS. Gold's Gym Enterprises uses GIS to study new franchise locations. Smaller companies, such as Ultra Marine Kayaking of Santa Cruz, California, find GIS useful and cost-effective for creating accurate and attractive maps for promotional materials. Learn more.
GOVENMENT:
National Government
Government agencies trust GIS technology to establish and regulate policy and to strengthen the welfare of their citizens. GIS is also an intelligent means for agencies to provide public information. The U.S. government relies heavily on GIS to evaluate the results of U.S. Census 2000. The city of Madrid, Spain, uses GIS to create its Plan General de Ordenación Urbana to link documents and image files to map features for an integrated view of information. Learn more.
Local Government
Revenue collection, economic development, and public information are just a few opportunities that GIS affords municipalities. The cities of Madrid, Geneva, and Paris all use GIS for providing many city services. Bregenze, a small township in Austria, uses GIS to meet the needs of its 12 government departments. Learn more.
Homeland Security
GIS assets at local, regional, and national levels are used in emergency response in the areas of detection, risk assessment, mitigation and prevention, preparedness, response, and recovery. Utilized in both natural and human-induced disasters, GIS has merged into the common operating procedures for public safety and emergency response activities. City, county, state, and federal-level agencies use GIS as a common framework for organizing and sharing data in a digital world. Learn more.
Military Defense
Military defense uses GIS for intelligence, terrain analysis, mission planning, and facilities management. Geographic analysis is critical in military operations, tactical or logistical planning, and infrastructure management. Sweden integrates global positioning systems (GPS) into its mobile GIS for a mine-clearing management system in Bosnia. Learn more.
Fire/Emergency Medical Services/Disaster
GIS allows public safety personnel to effectively plan for emergency response, determine mitigation priorities, analyze historical events, and predict future events. Wilson Fire/Rescue Services in Wilson, North Carolina, uses GIS to get critical information to incident responders upon dispatch or while en route to an emergency to assist in tactical planning. Learn more.
Law Enforcement
GIS is an effective crime-fighting tool. Police analysts use GIS for planning and event modeling, tactical and strategic planning, and incident mapping. The Chicago Police Department Informative Collection of Automated Mapping (ICAM) gives all police officers access to information about crime throughout the city. Learn more.
Health
Effective health care services management uses GIS not only to show what resources and needs exist but also where to find them. Health experts also put GIS to work in epidemiological and public health monitoring. They can geographically track public health indicators, identify disease clusters, and explore sites of environmental risk. For example, public health departments use GIS for mosquito abatement programs. The state of Pennsylvania offers an online Web site for its West Nile Virus Surveillance Program. Learn more.
Transportation
GIS serves three distinct transportation needs: infrastructure management, fleet and logistics management, and transit management. GIS offers insight for network planning and analysis, vehicle tracking and routing, inventory tracking, and route planning analysis. The city of Budapest, having 20,000 to 30,000 unexpected road repairs a year, relies heavily on its GIS to help plan, coordinate, manage, and complete repair work in a timely fashion. Learn more.
EDUCATION AND SCIENCE:
Research
GIS is an ideal tool to help researchers model the real world, classify and observe phenomena, and predict changes over time. Ready-made data models make it easy to work with layers of data to observe relationships and explore new methods to represent the world around us. Dawn Wright of Oregon State University uses the ArcGIS Marine Data Model as a development tool in the lab. Learn more.
Libraries and Museums
GIS creates interactive maps for museum exhibits that help visitors explore people, places, and events. GIS is also a valuable research tool used by museum scientists and researchers to increase people's understanding of natural systems and human cultures from anthropology to zoology. A researcher at the American Museum of Natural History in New York uses the museum's GIS to study the algae levels in the Gulf of Mexico. Learn more.
K-12 Education
GIS helps learners of all ages grasp the ways in which geography matters. GIS helps students and teachers engage in studies that require and promote critical thinking, integrated learning, and multiple intelligences at any grade level. Learn more.
Higher Education
The advance of GIS has opened up millions of employment opportunities. More than 3,000 colleges and universities have developed excellent courses and certificate and degree programs in GIS. Learn more.
ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT AND CONSERVATION:
Water
Environmental management and stewardship programs integrate a broad spectrum of data with the analysis tools of GIS to provide a better understanding of how elements of natural communities interact across a landscape. GIS is used worldwide in ecology labs, planning departments, parks, agencies, and nonprofit organizations to promote sustainable growth. The Los Angeles and San Gabriel Rivers Watershed Council uses GIS for habitat, wetland, and water quality mapping and planning. It uses GIS to map the Sepulveda Basin including headwater stream watersheds, channel characteristics, seasonal flow, adjacent land uses, and natural features in the existing habitat. Learn more.
Oceans
Marine GIS uses data from oceans and seas to represent nearshore and deepwater phenomena such as current, salinity, temperature, biological and ecological mass, and density. The Surfrider Foundation has developed a GIS application called Beachscape that provides up-to-date coastal information at the community level. The South Florida Ecosystem Restoration Program uses GIS to establish baseline information about bottle-nosed dolphins in Florida Bay. The team locates a pod of dolphins and then records the sighting location using a GPS unit. They follow focal animals and input their findings into the geodatabase. Learn more.
Land
Accurate information about the local landscape is critical to making decisions about what to protect and how to protect it. Digital maps of sites can be linked to a relational database that stores topography, baseline data, site documentation, and aerial digital photography.
Tug Hill Tomorrow Land Trust uses GIS to spatially illustrate natural features in the area, identify landowners with whom the trust interacts, and evaluate the protection projects according to priorities and criteria. The GPS team looks for discharge points and outfalls that are potential sources for pollutants to be dumped into the creek. Learn more.
Wildlife
GIS is an important tool in habitat and species management and protection. GIS enables the study of animal populations at a variety of scales as well as analysis tools to study habitat corridors; migration patterns; and the influence of parks, reserves, and sanctuaries for wildlife conservation.
Wolves were studied at Bolivia's Muse de Historia Natural. Based on Landsat images using ERDAS and vegetation maps, researchers recorded 13 habitats used by wolves in the study site to estimate their total area. They were also able to show potential habitats for wolves.
Dolphins in Florida Bay are being studied by the Dolphin Ecology Project, as shown by the map to the right. GIS is instrumental in testing the hypothesis that dolphins feed preferentially in habitats where water quality is good and prey densities are high.
Sea turtle journeys are tracked from space using GIS, transmitters, and the ARGOS satellites. The Oceanic Resource Foundation found GIS helpful in determining the migratory corridors and habitat usage patterns of green sea turtles that nest on the beaches of Lechuguillas Veracruz, Mexico. Learn more.
Vegetation
GIS is ideal for mapping and inventorying vegetation across landscapes and to better understand threatened and endangered species inventories for scientific and managerial applications.
The Indonesian government and the Wildlife Conservation Society Indonesia Program in Sulawesi use GIS to understand the biohabitat of Indonesia's preserve. The Mamirauá Project uses GIS to meet the conservancy's requirement of continually updating Mamirauá Reserve information. Its vegetation map is used to estimate forestry species stocks and monitor land clearing and subsistence agriculture. Learn more.
NATURAL RESOURCES:
Oil and gas exploration, hydrology harnessing, timber management, and mining operations require sound assessment to steer growth into areas that can support it while preventing contamination of rivers or destruction of resources. The delicate balance between industrial development and environmental conservation requires sophisticated modeling and spatial analytical tools. Companies and organizations, including The Nature Conservancy, the Environmental Protection Agency, Borax, and the Department of Fish and Wildlife, rely on GIS for resource analysis.
Agriculture
GIS provides the analytical capabilities that form the hub of a successful precision agriculture system. GIS lets farmers perform site-specific spatial analyses of agronomic data. The United States Department of Agriculture uses GIS to map a nation's farms not only by property lines but also by crop and yield. A farmer uses GIS to forecast crop yields and determine fertilizer spread. Learn more.
Forestry
Ireland's forestry service, Coillte Teoranta, uses GIS as a key component in managing its timber resources and maintaining sustainable forest management. Coillte Teoranta leverages GIS functionality for applications as diverse as land valuation, timber market analysis, harvest route planning, and landscape visualization. Learn more.
Mining
Terrain and ore body modeling, exploration, drilling, mine planning, reclamation, and rehabilitation are important digital mapping elements in mining. The Kaiser Jamaica Bauxite Company creates GIS-based mine planning and operations applications. Learn more.
Oil and Gas
Where to drill, route a pipeline, or build a refinery are all questions that rely heavily on an understanding of geography. Chevron relies on GIS for resource analysis. Learn more about GIS for Petroleum and Pipeline.
UTILITIES:
Power Management
The process of routing energy is highly dependent on geographic information. From network design to outage management, more than 80 percent of utility data management contains spatial components. Many utility companies combine their gas and electric service to customers. Jiangsu Provincial Power Company of China maps four kinds of data in its GIS: the base city map data, the geoschematic of the network, facilities data, and real-time data. Learn more.
Electricity
PPL, listed as a Fortune 500 company, has used GIS for almost 30 years to leverage facilities management (FM). PPL uses its electric facilities database (EFD) for responding to storm-caused outages. The dispatcher clicks on a pole, and the EFD shows all the attachments to that pole, whether they are from a cable company or utility company. The companies can be notified of the outage and quickly restore services. Learn more.
Gas
Gas source and physical pipeline management depend on GIS for every detail from stations and pipe pressures to valves and pipe diameter. METROGAS, the largest natural gas distributor in Chile, uses FM GIS applications for outage management, emergency response, gas distribution, network operation, planning and research, sales, engineering, and construction. Learn more.
Telecommunications
GIS provides telecommunication businesses with many solutions such as analyzing relationships among signal coverage, test results, trouble tickets, customer inquiries, revenues, and gap analysis. Velocom de Argentina uses GIS for geocoding antennas, analyzing service areas, geocoding clients, and correlating equipment requirements to service area demand. Learn more.
Water and Wastewater
The Colorado Springs Utility Water Resources Department's high-resolution maps detail the location of its underground pipelines, watersheds, reservoirs, and hydroelectric facilities. Its database of information gained at its raw water treatment complex will help the department assess possible expansion capabilities. Learn more.
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