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is an important and noble exercise whenfunding is not an issue and when the goal isresearch, health, safety, and security-relatedanalysis. Infrastructure companies such asutilities and telecommunications providerswith regulatory mandates have justified thecosts in the past. However, in today’s costcuttingenvironment, passing these costs tothe customer is no longer acceptable.Although most companies recognizethat 80% of their business intelligencedata is location oriented, they have yetto find a way to leverage that data in asystematic way. ERDAS CEO Bob Morrisacknowledges, “The business world isdriven by ROI, and traditional geospatialtechnologies have been limited todepartmental deployments within an organization.”Instead of dealing with IT andall the costs associated with acquiring,maintaining, and integrating the locationdata, many analysts and managers areexperimenting with data and services thatare freely available on the Internet.Right now, “free” seems to offer apretty good ROI. Morris believes, “Bydeploying geospatial technologies withina Service Oriented Architecture (SOA),the utilization of geospatial businesssystems will increase and will also drive ahigher ROI for our customers.” This ROIdilemma constantly reminds us that enterprisesdo not necessarily understand howto approach mapping, spatial imageryand location data as a systemic strategicasset. For business to leverage location,a new approach to cost, revenue or theperception of value is needed.For business to leverage location, anew approach to cost, revenue or theperception of value is needed.PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDREW STERNARDMaps have served many differentpurposes over the years, from explorationto navigation to documentation toIMAGING NOTES // S UMMER 2008 // WWW.IMAGINGNOTES.COM9