Geography and eWISEinc LLC

   Maps, Maps, Maps.

One of the reasons for joining AAA used to be a package of maps and instructions they would send you to help you plan long trips.  Today's Google Maps solves that problem... though AAA will still help you if your car breaks down or you meet someone in the Target parking lot who locked her baby in the car with the keys (happened to me this week).

I took a shortcut home from school one day when I was 8... and got pretty lost.  My second foray with a long trip was in Junior High School, the first of four bike trips from Connecticut to New Hampshire.  We planned which route to take and where to stay each night.  Every summer my brother, several friends and/or I took versions of that bike trip, although we never all rode and it was never the same group (injuries got in the way).

Army ROTC helped me improve my map skills, culminating in my graduation from Ranger school in 1984...  in addition to a challenging land navigation course in the "City phase," we could be questioned at any time on a patrol to point out our location on a map with the end of a blade of grass.  Mind you, the challenge could come in the middle of a swamp in 20-degree weather after you had been carrying a 70 pound ruck on 3 hours sleep and two skimpy meals for five weeks.  My map skills had improved significantly.

In my first job in the Army as a Regular Army Officer, we deployed an early version of that geographic system on your phone.  The system was 2 1/2 feet square and let you add data with a cumbersome and slow interface.  Although I had done statistical analysis as part of my thesis, winning the Julius Turner Prize as an undergraduate, my interactions with this new "GIS" lit a light bulb for me:  computers are going to dramatically change the way we interact with the world and the way we lead organizations.

After obtaining my Harvard MBA, I interacted with the "Catalyst" team at Sun Microsystems.  One of the marketing managers was responsible for working with independent software vendors that built GIS systems with UNIX.  In those days, ESRI and MAPINFO were the two main competitors.

A couple years ago I led Lockheed Martin's capture team on the Military Terrain III response.  The organization responsible for this geographic data Request for Proposal was the Army Geospatial Center, nominally part of the Army's Corps of Engineers, although the National Geospatial Center has that mission for the government as a whole.  Sadly, the Army cancelled that acquisition a bit over a month  ago... posting several small business set-asides to fill the gap (funding permitting).

Since I'm a small business, I'm investigating.  Many US Armed Forces weapons systems are dependent on geographic systems to operate.  Would be intriguing to help!