de maximis Data Management Solutions, Inc
Maximizing the Value of Geospatial Data

Today, geographic information systems (GIS) are no longer limited to government, telecommunications, utilities, or oil and gas sectors. The reach of the technology has expanded significantly and now includes retail, healthcare, and education sectors. This has opened new opportunities in the geospatial data management marketplace. Leveraging GIS capabilities, organizations now have the power to store, quantify, visualize, and manage geospatial data to drive better business decisions.

In an interview with CIO Applications, Mark Packard, CEO of de maximis Data Management Solutions, Inc (ddms), discusses the benefits of incorporating geospatial data in today’s business landscape. He also elucidates ddms’ expertise in the Environmental Systems Research Institute (Esri) solution stack and their ability to deliver tools built atop Esri’s GIS software to address business-specific workflows in the field of environmental services.

Could you provide a brief overview of your company?

ddms is a service-oriented company that, among other tools, utilizes Esri’s GIS solutions to provide world-class data management, analysis, and visualization services for the environmental, energy, and natural resource industries. Our company’s teams of project managers, scientists, database administrators, geospatial analysts, software engineers, and cartographers have been providing our clients with extensive geospatial services to improve their GIS project objectives since the late 90s.

What GIS solution trends does ddms intend to leverage in 2019?

In the GIS market, we see an increasing need for system integration and API capabilities to improve communication between disparate systems. ddms believes that the application of machine learning and AI in geospatial analysis holds enormous potential to improve business outcomes in every industry. Today, we are entering a technological golden age with the convergence of technologies including IoT, 5G networks, and a consumer base that has become accustomed to thinking spatially through the use of consumer apps. Therefore, our team—inspired by the prospects of these innovations—is continuously working on incorporating new technologies, along with Esri’s geospatial data mapping tools, in every project that we undertake.

What are some of the pertinent challenges that your clients face? How is ddms addressing those setbacks effectively?

While many of today’s industries— supply chain management, insurance, and urban planning, to name a few— have come a long way in terms of understanding the role of GIS, we see many organizations still struggling to leverage GIS effectively. Moreover, successful GIS implementations require integrations with other systems to gain the full value of a business intelligence platform. This adds complexity and requires the involvement of a greater pool of subject matter experts, as the enterprise-wide implementation of GIS can often be an arduous task. We have a comprehensive understanding of the full Esri solution stack and the high-caliber experience to develop tools on top of it to address a customer’s business-specific workflows. We study the problems of our clients and then suggest a variety of GIS solutions before implementing them.

How do your solutions and services help your clients? Could you cite a few cases?

We have three main service areas: customized, GIS-enabled enterprise application development, environmental data management hosting and enterprise implementations, and environmental chemistry services. When deploying a customized Esri solution for a client, ddms assesses the technical maturity of the client to ensure that the solutions implemented not just meet their present needs but also prepare them for the future. Sometimes, it is easier to outsource the hosting and maintenance to ddms, but we do not come into a project with that in mind.

For one of our clients, a large energy corporation, we built a custom Esri-based solution to collapse the many ways they had been accessing spatial data, both internally and from external, vendor-based systems. In another instance, for a Fortune 100 Company, we implemented ArcGIS Enterprise as part of a much larger GIS implementation which enabled its users to safely share their geospatial data and improve organizational collaboration.

Additionally, our ‘Project Portal™’ offering, an intuitive, cloud-based application developed for environmental and energy industries, brings together data, documents, and schedules together in a centralized environment. ddms has leveraged and evolved Esri-based GIS within it to provide secure, project-specific GIS tools to our users. We understand that different projects require different combinations of modules depending on the specifics of that project, and thus we offer the flexibility to our clients to choose the right tools as per their requirements.

What does the future hold for your company?

Successfully leveraging data is a crucial requirement in today’s digital-first world. Geospatial data is increasingly gaining importance to help understand the world around us and help us make more informed decisions. Our vision is to integrate systems, subject matter exports and advances in technology overall to empower our clients and leverage GIS to the greatest extent possible. As alluded to earlier, we very commonly find our inspiration from other industries and work persistently to apply those ideas and practices into all of our products and services.