Finding their Way

Finding their Way

TECHNOLOGY by Francic X. Gilpin | Associate Editor

In his old job, Kirk Kolstad showed Comcast Corp. cable television installers how they could use digital mapping to make their working lives easier.

"They were all just like, 'You can do that? Oh, my God, this is going to completely change my life,'" Kolstad recalls of the reaction from the cable guys. "And it did. They managed their time better. It gave them a true picture of where they were going. They could route their service calls. It was great."

Kolstad expects the same adulation from customers of his new employer, Clearwater geographical information systems consultant Spatial NetWorks Inc.

GIS, once the exclusive province of highly trained engineers, has been democratized over the past decade. Kolstad and other GIS experts used to have trouble convincing a sales team that they could map a database of their customer accounts. Now, thanks to AOL MapQuest and Google Maps, he doesn't get quite so many quizzical looks.

Kolstad is one of several recent hires by Spatial NetWorks founder Anthony J. Quartararo III, who spent the first five years of his company's existence spreading GIS technology throughout China, India and the Middle East.

Kolstad and Kimberly McCoskey, business development manager at Spatial NetWorks, are among a handful of employees who have been charged by Quartararo with finding GIS clients in the United States, particularly in Florida.

Although Spatial NetWorks is nearly 6 years old, the Clearwater company is almost starting from scratch as it tries to get recognized for GIS work among businesses and governments in its own backyard.

Quartararo declined to be interviewed for this story, instead deferring to the staff he has hired to make it happen stateside. He also declined to disclose any sales or revenue growth figures.

GIS maturing

Quartararo, 37, of Pinellas Park, previously worked as a GIS manager at Dames & Moore Group. He left around the time that the engineering firm was acquired in 1999 by URS Corp., a San Francisco-based international engineering and design company.

Striking out on his own, Quartararo originally called his company Spatial Fusion Inc. before changing the name to Spatial NetWorks.

His career move coincided with an emerging consensus among business and government officials that they had as much call for powerful digital mapping software as oil companies picking drilling sites or civil engineers laying out new highways. That feeling was stoked by ESRI Inc., a California company founded in the 1960s that pioneered bringing GIS onto the personal computer desktop.

"In general, GIS is kind of reaching a level of maturity, where you're seeing not only large cities but smaller municipalities or counties, not having a need, but a demand for the services," says Kolstad.

After Kolstad, McCoskey and marketing director Alicia Welch joined Spatial NetWorks in 2005, they identified local governments in high-growth states such as Florida as an attractive market.

Even in counties that caught on to GIS during the 1990s, Kolstad says seldom are digital mapping resources coordinated at the highest levels of the government.

"What is typical of the government is for different areas and different sectors not to really cross-communicate about their GIS platforms, about databases, and be able to successfully leverage the information across multiple divisions of the government," says Kolstad. "We see that all the time."

Park department supervisors might not know that the school board has databases or digital maps that could help them figure out where to host summer programs that will attract the most youngsters.

"Particularly within the government, it's very typical of them to get very niche in the development and not be able to kind of bring it back to the full picture," says Kolstad.

Art of computing

Pictures fascinate Kolstad as much as computers, sometimes more so.

At the University of Oklahoma in the early 1980s, Kolstad switched majors from computer science to art after an unpleasant encounter with Fortran, a programming language favored by engineers and mathematicians. "It was just ridiculous how antiquated it was," he says.

After graduation, he drifted back into computing as a database consultant for museums. About 10 years ago, Kolstad started working for a mapping software developer. Finally, his visual and tech orientations melded into one job.

Kolstad took some GIS classes and taught himself the rest. He eventually went to work for telecommunications companies that needed somebody to help them locate the best spots for cellular telephone towers. Kolstad was at a cable company when Quartararo recruited him to Florida.

In marketing to government, Spatial NetWorks touts the potential savings for taxpayers when various jurisdictions pool their GIS resources. "A traditional ESRI GIS system is not a cheap thing to build or implement," says Kolstad. A county-level GIS implementation runs from $500,000 to $1 million, he says.

That is why Kolstad says Spatial NetWorks is encouraging clients to consider a growing body of shareware, freeware and open-source mapping applications that can liberate clients from costly ESRI licensing agreements.

However, most government bureaucrats aren't in the mood for experimentation. "When you're talking about a large-scale GIS implementation, there's a lot of leeriness within government," he says.

So knowledgeable hand-holders from the outside will be in demand for some time to come, even as Kolstad acknowledges his consulting field is getting crowded. For a limited time, Spatial NetWorks is doing small jobs to get in the door at city hall or the county courthouse. "You have to build trust," Kolstad says. "You have to prove that you're capable of doing the job and not have a trail of bodies behind you."

Along the way, Kolstad and McCoskey are learning which governments will give them a fair shake in the procurement process and which write bid specifications to favor competitors who got there first.

Kolstad says the flexibility of Spatial NetWorks helps the company stand out – and, he hopes, will help it win out. "We're agnostic," he says. "Any platform that works for the solution is the one that we'll take."

ADDING VALUE

Spatial NetWorks Inc. is trying a couple of approaches to cracking the American civilian market for computerized-mapping services.

First, the Clearwater-based consultant is seeking other tech vendors with established local, county and state government contacts or contracts that might like to add GIS to their product offerings.

Kimberly McCoskey, business development manager at Spatial Networks, recently addressed a Lakeland meeting of central Florida tech companies looking for strategic partners.

After briefly reciting the overseas credentials of Spatial NetWorks, McCoskey told the audience: "Your name is probably a little more known in the 'States than our name. Names are important. We drop names. So with that, we want to partner with companies that can be recognized by their name."

The other approach is to design GIS products specifically for government officials in dangerous times.

Spatial NetWorks will assist damage-assessment teams after natural disasters with a small GPS-enabled device, fitting in a shirt pocket, that transits completed forms and photographs wirelessly via a personal digital assistant back to an office server, where the location is automatically mapped and the data stored for easy retrieval.

"No wires, no writing," says Jeff Trudnick, the company's director of geospatial technology and informational services.

A second GIS product currently being promoted to Florida law enforcement is called WatchLink. The program not only maps the addresses of registered sex offenders, but notifies neighbors via e-mail whenever an offender moves or goes missing.