Institute’s business school is getting attention by helping companies exploit software for creating interactive maps embedded with information

The Chicago Geospatial Exchange sounds as if it could be a new financial market trading in some sort of exotic futures.

But don’t look for frenzied floor activity or pit traders in brightly colored jackets at this exchange housed in a modern building west of the city’s Loop.

By William Grady
Tribune staff reporter

http://www.chicagotribune.com/technology/chi-0402160012feb16,1,1603645.story?coll=chi-business-hed

Instead, the nearly year-old Chicago Geospatial Exchange is a training and consulting program that one of the city’s lower-profile business schools hopes will help put it on the map.

The exchange was launched last March by Matthew Williams, an adjunct professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Stuart Graduate School of Business and a former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency manager.

Williams wants to promote a wider use — particularly among corporations — of new computer mapping technologies and also a way of thinking that relies on information presented in highly visual forms.

"Maps are a better way to communicate complex information in a simple format," said Williams, director of the exchange.

It is sometimes difficult, he said, to comprehend data that is presented as a mind-numbing series of tables or spreadsheets.

"With geospatial, you try to represent the world more accurately," Williams said.

Using maps for business purposes is not new, said Grant Thrall, a professor of business geography at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Thrall has found an example that dates to the late 1700s.

What is new, however, is the recent growth of innovative computer mapping technologies called geographic information systems, or GIS. Such software can be used to create interactive maps with layers of information embedded in them. Thrall describes GIS maps as "spatial databases."

Among the familiar uses of GIS technology are the computer-generated maps that television weather forecasters use to show brightly colored radar images of precipitation swirling across the nation–or to drill down to show temperatures and wind speeds at specific sites.

Government planning agencies also use GIS to embed traffic counts and other measures of congestion in highway maps.

In consulting work done through the Chicago Geospatial Exchange, designed a prototype mapping program for a corporate client that could be used to track and manage key operations in real time at company facilities throughout the United States.

The exchange also is sharing in a federal technology grant awarded last fall to the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission. The exchange will provide training and support for a pilot program intended to introduce GIS mapping to city and suburban neighborhoods in an effort to better guide their development.

But the tools and technology of business geography are just as important to multibranch retailers and other types of stores, Thrall said.

Before deciding whether to build a store in a neighborhood shopping center, for example, a video retailer might map the distance–in miles or driving time–from its existing stores and those of competitors.

It also likely would map the nearby neighborhoods, by census tract or ZIP code, from which it would draw customers.

Clicking on an area of the map would bring up demographic data on income or spending habits–all of which could help predict the volume of rentals and whether the store should, in Thrall’s example, stock Arnold Schwarzenegger movies or multiple copies of "Driving Miss Daisy."

But commercial geography and GIS technologies are rarely taught in the nation’s business schools, according to Thrall and Susan Wachter, a professor of real estate and financial management at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Wharton, which has had a GIS laboratory associated with its real estate department since 1997, is an exception, Wachter said.

"Large business schools are more likely to take this on," she said.

IIT’s Stuart Graduate School of Business, in a 10-story building at 565 W. Adams St., sees training in geospatial technology as a niche that would allow it to compete with the highly regarded, better-known programs at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago.

The Chicago Geospatial Exchange eventually wants to offer executive-level courses in GIS technologies and provide businesses with access to the school’s GIS-equipped computer labs.

Founded by IIT in 1969, the fully accredited Stuart is one of Chicago’s smaller business schools, with about 600 full- or part-time students and 22 full-time faculty members. It offers a broad range of courses but has become known for its programs in financial markets and environmental management.

Williams and others say that geospatial thinking is more than just learning how to plug numbers into GIS software.

He compares GIS for business with the use of magnetic resonance imaging equipment by doctors–tools that give doctors a new way to see medical problems.

But the images don’t help much unless doctors understand what they are seeing and how to use the information to make a diagnosis.

"I don’t love the technology," Williams said. "I love the solutions."

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