International Leaders Provide Insights To Spatial Data Strategies At The ESRI Senior Executive Summit 2010

Land Information New Zealand Minister Maurice Williamson addressed ~ 400 senior executives at the ESRI Senior Executive Summit 2010. International leaders from New Zealand, Mexico, Abu Dhabi and Australia gathered to talk about spatial data strategies as part of the ESRI International User Conference 2010.

Maurice Williamson, Minister for Land Information, Parliament, of New Zealand spoke with enormous passion about educating his fellow ministers about not only using GIS but managing all government entities with geospatial information.

“I feel evangelical about this whole frontier,” said Williamson. “I have got the religion.” Williamson is focusing on developing a national spatial data infrastructure and raising awareness at senior levels within government that GIS is vitally important. But he faces a common problem. “One of the barriers of advancement [in GIS] is the lack of skills and quality of people in the marketplace,” he said.

The minister also cited us, Eagle Technology Group Ltd and some of the work we have been doing in making GIS more accessible in New Zealand.

Williamson cited Eagle Technology that is developing a web based learning portal to make GIS software widely accessible to all schools in New Zealand.

I received some great comments about the ministers speech with one user saying and I quote:

Your NZ minister rocked it today at the exec meeting. Every government needs such a passionate GEO advocate at the minister level

But the ESRI Senior Executive Summit 2010 wasn’t all about New Zealand, there were a number of other international leaders in attendance who provided their insights. A brief on each of their speeches can be found here which was covered very well by Directions Media: http://apb.directionsmag.com/archives/…