“Silos build the wall in people’s minds and creates the barrier in organizations’ hearts” — Pearl Zhu
Over the course of 2022, I attended three conferences/summits. The first one was in Orlando, and it was a large Reinsurance conference, where I learned my social battery was shot to hell, and I needed to return to my hotel room during lunch and before dinner to recharge. I learned a bunch about how the insurance industry views wildfire. Also, I learned that private-sector client meals are a whole different ballgame than entertaining a federal client. Hello, 20oz wagyu steaks and seafood towers.
Around April, I was invited to GIS-Pro in Boise, ID. The event took place in early October. I was invited to present on Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging in the Geospatial Industry. I put together a presentation on Gender in Geospatial and how we’re failing 51% of the population. The slide deck is here, and you can always ping me if you want to talk about it.
This past week, I went down to Northern Virginia to the OGC to learn about the standards for Wildfire and Climate Change, and how the OGC and the feds are dealing with these. I went down intending to understand what they are doing and how we, the insurance industry, could adopt or use this as a basis for our Climate Change and ESG initiatives. (More on this in another entry).
When I told people what I did, they looked at me confused or ignored me if they were BD. Which is fine, some were there to hustle, and others were to connect to mission partners. I did help a BD person do a few quick layups because she was there to hustle, and I like helping.
A few of the panelists indicated that the Insurance and Reinsurance industries should be involved, and I have a tasker to get ahold of them in the new year.
What this blog entry is about is the gap between GIS in the private sector and the public sector. Now, to be clear, when I say “private sector” I’m not talking about government contractors. I’m talking about private companies with private clients. Like Insurance, Precision Agriculture, OnG, Retail, Real Estate, and the like.
There is a lot of training on how to be a leader, how to plan strategically, and how to do all sorts of stuff in Geospatial when you work for or with the public sector. URISA’s Leadership academy is geared toward those actors but not geared toward the private sector.
Those in this private sector can use all the business school books and HBR/Sloane articles we can, but they aren’t specifically geospatial. We have similar issues with geospatial data and how to build a consensus and show value to our stakeholders. Sometimes it's showing ROI, sometimes, it's showing profit defense, and other times it can be a basis for a larger initiative (this is where ESG comes in).
As ESG becomes more of a “thing” in the private sector, there will be more business in this vertical. And those of us trained in the world of fed contracting or government style management will face a gap in how to speak to those people whose stakeholders are investors, looking for an ROI, and not just a service to citizens.
What I’m driving at is something I’ve been yelling about on Twitter for a bit. Geospatial is becoming more private sector focused, and we, as a community, aren’t ready for that. URISA, or any other organization, must get ahead of this before we get buried. While we can adapt on the fly, but we should be ahead of it and understand the issues facing these “new” stakeholders and how we can better serve them.
We all have seen the effects of climate change over the past few years. While governments are doing their best to fight it, the Reinsurance and Insurance industries are thinking 50 to 80 years out because it makes financial sense to invest a billion in tech now instead of rebuilding the lower east side in 2075.
By bridging the gap between the Public and the HARD Private sector, we can all benefit. The first step is to start cross-training leadership so we all speak the same language of geospatial and business. If anyone wants to brainstorm or speak in more depth about this, ping me.
