Redlands, California—Launching a geographic information system (GIS) involves more than investing in GIS software and a bank of computers. Organizations must first design the system infrastructure, a process succinctly spelled out in Building a GIS: System Architecture Design Strategies for Managers, new from ESRI Press.

Author Dave Peters, director of systems integration for ESRI, shares a tried-and-true methodology for building a successful system for GIS that’s rooted in ESRI’s consulting experience and feedback from customers. He hopes the book will help managers avoid a common tendency to “feel their way” to a proper system design.

“The system architecture design methodology in this book has already led to thousands of successful GIS deployments by ESRI customers over the last two decades,” Peters says. The fundamentals behind this methodology are embodied in the Capacity Planning Tool (CPT), a design analysis tool that Peters introduces in the book. It is a user-friendly Microsoft Office 2007 Excel-based “workbook” he created to help in capacity planning, the primary system design task of matching system components to an organization’s needs. Chapters 7 through 11 (in the book and on an accompanying CD) are devoted to understanding and using the CPT, an automated tool that virtually completes the design analysis as organizations identify what they want from the system.

Building a GIS reads like an A to Z for creating a GIS framework. The first six chapters provide an overview of the technology, covering topics such as the system design process, software technology, network communications, GIS product architecture, enterprise security, and GIS data administration. The next three chapters focus on the fundamentals of system, software, and hardware platform performance. The last section provides the how-to for completing a system design that will lead to a successful implementation, using a fictional city for the case study.

Building a GIS serves as a companion piece to Thinking About GIS: Geographic Information System Planning for Managers   by Dr. Roger Tomlinson, known as “the father of GIS.” Tomlinson regards Peters as “the guru of system architecture,” while ESRI president Jack Dangermond calls Peters a “pragmatic visionary” who applies foresight and imagination toward developing simple, universal tools that solve complex, real-world problems.    

“Like its author, who is both a teacher and an inventor of creative solutions, this book does double duty: it offers novices a handle on the classic, technical fundamentals while lending experts the latest, state-of the-art planning tools and models,” Dangermond says.

Building a GIS: System Architecture Design Strategies for Managers (ISBN: 978-1-58948-159-6, 302 pages, $44.95) is available at online retailers worldwide, at www.esri.com/esripress, or by calling 1-800-447-9778. Outside the United States, visit www.esri.com/esripressorders for complete ordering options or contact your local ESRI distributor. For a current distributor list, visit www.esri.com/distributors. Interested retailers can contact ESRI Press book distributor Ingram Publisher Services.

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About ESRI Press

ESRI Press publishes books on GIS, cartography, and the application of spatial analysis to many areas of public and private endeavor including land-use planning, health care, education, business, government, and science. The complete selection of GIS titles from ESRI Press can be found on the Web at www.esri.com/esripress.

About ESRI
Since 1969, ESRI has been giving customers around the world the power to think and plan geographically. The market leader in GIS, ESRI software is used in more than 300,000 organizations worldwide including each of the 200 largest cities in the United States, most national governments, more than two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies, and more than 7,000 colleges and universities. ESRI applications, running on more than one million desktops and thousands of Web and enterprise servers, provide the backbone for the world’s mapping and spatial analysis. ESRI is the only vendor that provides complete technical solutions for desktop, mobile, server, and Internet platforms. Visit us at www.esri.com.