It looks like agile practices in the GIS world are about to go mainstream. ESRI, the industry leader is GIS software, has recently hired Dirk Gorter, formerly of Symantec Corporation, as a member of their senior corporate management team in the newly created position of director of product management. His charter is to implement new processes that will help ESRI create innovative GIS software products that integrate into the wider business IT solution.
In the ESRI press release, Gorter commented that “GIS technology is increasingly being integrated into mainstream business operations within an enterprise-wide IT strategy. This new wave of users have requirements that can only be met by innovative software designs.
The press release continues saying “Because of his wide experience in both medium and large software companies, Gorter’s focus is on implementing a product management process that is similar to the agile product development process commonly used by software development teams. In this process, the initial steps used to achieve a result are analyzed, expanded, and reemployed for successive iterations.”
Gorter said “I will be employing a similar process here at ESRI. By using agile product management methods, we can implement a process that is very effective in understanding market needs and defining product requirements. The results will be products with new capabilities that can help GIS departments transform to a more pivotal role within their organization and better meet the expanding needs of their client base.”
I think this is incredible news for the GIS industry. Both Dave Bouwman and I have written posts asking when the GIS community will start realizing the benefits of agile practices. I believe that with ESRI taking such a definitive stance in favor of implementing agile practices, that this could be the impetus the GIS world has been waiting for. If the market leader in GIS software is going agile, hopefully the rest of the GIS market will follow their lead. I am very excited about the future of GIS development and ESRI’s agile adoption. I’m hoping it truly brings GIS development into the mainstream of agile software development.
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One Response
November 13th, 2008 at 9:46 am
Hey Chris, we at Pitney Bowes Business Insight (formerly MapInfo) have been using Scrum for since the summer.
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