• 60% of those surveyed interact with companies using social media

Of those 60%:

• 93% say a company should have a presence in social media
• 85% say a company should not only be present but also interact with its customers via social media
• 56% say they feel a stronger connection with and better served by companies when they can interact with them in a social media environment
• 43% say companies should use social networks to solve customers’ problems
• 41% say companies should use social media to solicit feedback about products and services

Now, granted, this is an online survey, so the results may be a bit skewed. There is probably still a large population out there who have no idea what Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn even is (much less participate in online surveys). In fact, here’s a great post from Chris Brogan about keeping it real with real people (who aren’t geeks like us). But for those of your customers who are connected, you can’t afford to ignore the numbers uncovered by Cone in their study.

And, if you’re looking to start using social media in your marketing and PR efforts, HubSpot has a free webinar this week on How to Use Twitter for Marketing and PR. Here are the details:

Date: Friday, October 10, 2008

Time: 2PM EDT (GMT-4)

Duration: 1 Hour

Register here

Overall the survey was a huge success.  We gathered 347 responses from GIS professionals from 36 countries.  Here are some of the highlights:

Of 347 respondents, 32% said their organization had adopted any agile practices, 68% said they had not.  This compares to 69% of the mainstream development world that has adopted agile practices according to Scott Ambler’s survey asking the same question in 2007.

But don’t despair.  There is good news.  Although the general agile adoption rate is lower amongst GIS developers than mainstream developers, once they do adopt agile practices, they do so pretty much in the same fashion as everyone else does.  And more good news, of the respondents who indicated that their organizations had adopted agile practices, 86% indicated that they have used agile on at  least 2 projects.  This means that agile practices are moving beyond the pilot stage for the GIS development teams that are doing agile.

Within the GIS development population, there are definite differences in how different practices are adopted based on organization size and organizational experience with agile practices.

Another key finding was related to coaching and training.  The survey indicated that 49% of Expert teams (those who have run more than 20 agile projects) have received agile training as compared to 0% of Rookies (1 agile project), 8% of Learning Curve teams (2-5 agile projects), and 14% of Mature teams (5-20 agile projects). Agile coaching displayed a similar trend in that 29% of Experts have used agile coaches to help improve and accelerate their agile adoption while 0% of Rookies, 3% of Learning Curves, and 14% of Mature teams have done the same.

So, at the risk of writing too much here beyond highlights, download the whitepaper and the results summary and check it out for yourself.  If you’re interested in more detailed results that you can run your own analyses on, please contact me directly.

I would like to thank the following individuals and organizations for their promotion of the Agile GIS Survey: James Fee of Spatially Adjusted and Planet Geospatial , Adena Schutzberg of Directions Magazine, Hilary Perkins of URISA and DTS, Glenn Letham of The AnyGeo Blog, Ron Exler of the GeoFactor, and Agile Commons. I would also like thank Ryan Martens of Rally Software Development for independently reviewing and commenting on the results of this study.

The results of this poll stand in sharp contrast to the level of agile adoption in the broader software development world.  According to an August 2006 survey by Version One, 84% of the 722 respondents indicated that their company had adopted Agile development practices somewhere within their software organization.  A similar survey conducted by Digital Focus last year concluded that 81% of the 136 executives they surveyed were either actively using Agile development methodologies within their organization or looking for opportunities to do so.  This makes two clear points:

1. Agile is rapidly gaining acceptance as the primary tool in today’s mainstream application development world
2. GIS software development is lagging behind mainstream development when it comes to agile adoption

To hammer home this point, Mary Poppendieck gave a keynote speech about the state of agile adoption at the Agile Development Practices conference called “Welcome to the Mainstream”.  Mary concluded that agile has crossed the chasm and is now part of mainstream software development.  She used Geoffrey Moore’s classic product adoption diagram to illustrate where agile practices are in the general software development adoption curve.  I’d like to modify the product adoption diagram further to illustrate where I believe GIS agile adoption is today as follows:

The second poll asked a question about what type of educational course GIS professionals would choose.  The significant result here is that the second highest response was “Project Management” at 16%.  This agrees with what I have repeatedly heard at the conclusion of nearly every ESRI Users Conference I’ve attended in the past 10 years.  Every year, Jack Dangermond asks conference attendees what they want more of in the conference for the next year.  Without fail, someone always says “Project management” which is usually met by big applause from the audience.

I believe that these two results taken in combination provide some great insight into two areas of the GIS industry that need real help: Agile adoption and project management.  What I really think is that the GIS world is ready to begin it’s journey down the path toward accepting agile project management practices to start producing valuable, quality software for our end users.

To meet that need in the GIS market place Data Transfer Solutions is going to begin offering agile project management and software development training and coaching in 2008.  With the breadth of knowledge we have accumulated through our own agile adoption, we’d like to work to help bring the rest of the GIS into the mainstream fold of agile project management and software development.  If you’re interested in training or assistance in getting your agile adoption underway, please feel free to contact either myself or Dave Bouwman.