Dr. Roger Tomlinson to Conduct GIS Seminar at ESRI's European User Conference

Informi GIS and ESRI are pleased to announce that Dr. Roger Tomlinson will be conducting a preconference seminar with the 19th Annual European Conference for ESRI Users.

The seminar will be held on Sunday, November 7, at Informi GIS, Charlottelund and will focus on planning, implementing and managing a GIS. The Seminar starts at 9.00 and ends at 16.00 and includes lunch at Informi GIS.

About the Seminar
This is the basic seminar for current or potential GIS managers or senior executives who need to know the steps they must take to put a successful GIS in place in their organization. Jack Dangermond himself has written that this seminar bridges the communication gap between those two levels of management. A consistent methodology for planning and managing GIS is pre­sented. This methodology has evolved in step with the technology and is based on extensive experience with GIS implementations ranging in size from small corporate installations to multidepart­ment statewide systems and complete national enterprisewide systems.

The seminar focuses on the practical aspects of planning and implementing a GIS as part of an organization’s business strat­egy and work flows. It is concerned with the integration of GIS technology and business practice to achieve organizationwide coordination and information sharing. The planning methodol­ogy includes a well tested approach to benefit–cost analysis that has proved acceptable to financial controllers worldwide. The management component of the seminar discusses the day-to-day details of GIS management, of creating the personnel and technical environments for hardware acquisition and deployment, system migration, data acquisition and application development, legal issues, risk analysis, and organizational control and personnel structures that have been proven to be most effective.

About Dr. Roger Tomlinson
Dr. Roger Tomlinson is president of Tomlinson Associates, a company of consulting geographers with branches in Canada, the United States, and Australia and with activity worldwide. Tomlinson Associates specializes in planning and implementing geographic information systems for its clients.

The extensive list of clients includes federal, provincial, state, municipal, and corporate agencies throughout North America and Europe, more recently in Australia, and in many developing countries of the world. International agencies, such as the World Bank and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, are also clients. This success is helped by the fact that Dr. Tomlinson is the originator of geographic information systems as we know them today. He named the field in the early 1960s and has been a leader ever since. There is no substitute for that kind of experience.

On the world stage, Dr. Tomlinson was chairman of the International Geographical Union (IGU) GIS Commission for 12 years. He pioneered the concepts of worldwide geographical data availability as chairman of the IGU Global Database Planning Project in 1988. He is a past president of the Canadian Association of Geographers and a recipient of its rare Award for Service to the Profession. The Association of American Geographers in the United States awarded him the James R. Anderson Medal of Honor for Applied Geography in 1995. Dr. Tomlinson is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and winner of its prestigious Murchison Award for the Development of Geographic Information Systems. In 1996 he was awarded the GIS World Lifetime Achievement Award for a lifetime of work with geographic information systems, and he was the first recipient of the ESRI Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997. In February of 2004, the Governor General of Canada vested him in the Order of Canada, which is Canada’s highest civilian honor, recognizing him as the “father of GIS” who is “changing the face of geography as a discipline.” In short, no one has deeper or more recognized GIS consulting experience, and this is being assimilated into this seminar and the new ESRI Virtual Campus course on GIS planning and management.