Building A GIS, System Architecture Design Strategies For Managers

A new book has been published and made available from ESRI Press. Author Dave Peters shares him methodology for infrastructure planning.

Author Dave Peters, director of systems integration for ESRI, shares a tried-and-true methodology for building a successful system for GIS that’s rooted in ESRI’s consulting experience and feedback from customers. He hopes the book will help managers avoid a common tendency to “feel their way” to a proper system design.

There are a number of users that ask about capacity planning and how to go about calculating this. Dave answers this question in his new book.

“The system architecture design methodology in this book has already led to thousands of successful GIS deployments by ESRI customers over the last two decades,” Peters says. The fundamentals behind this methodology are embodied in the Capacity Planning Tool (CPT), a design analysis tool that Peters introduces in the book. It is a user-friendly Microsoft Office 2007 Excel-based “workbook” he created to help in capacity planning, the primary system design task of matching system components to an organization’s needs. Chapters 7 through 11 (in the book and on an accompanying CD) are devoted to understanding and using the CPT, an automated tool that virtually completes the design analysis as organizations identify what they want from the system.

I think this tool will be very useful for users out there in planning some of the needs of their organisation. I have yet to receive my copy but it sounds like a book that is well worth the money. I think Jack sums it up quite nicely when he says:

“Like its author, who is both a teacher and an inventor of creative solutions, this book does double duty: it offers novices a handle on the classic, technical fundamentals while lending experts the latest, state-of the-art planning tools and models,” Dangermond says

The press release on this book can be found here: http://www.esri.com/news/… with specific information from ESRI Press here: http://gis.esri.com/esripress/… On the ESRI Press web site you can also preview the first three chapters.