00:01So I'm going to let you participate a little bit.

00:03So what's the weakest finger in your hand?

00:08C'mon. The pinkie. That's right.

00:12And what is the most popular letter of the alphabet?

00:17A. That's right. Somebody won.

00:19So tell me this, why is it that the original designers of the keyboard chose to put the most popular letter A...

00:28...in that awkward position to be struck by the baby finger?

00:33Why is that? Doesn't make any sense.

00:37I'll tell you.

00:39Well the original keyboard, of course, was the mechanical typewriter.

00:44And the layout actually originally had the popular letters in very easy to get to places.

00:50But what happened is, over time, people got good at it and typists became faster, the letters all jammed up.

00:59So they had to figure out another way of designing the typewriter.

01:02And what they did is they moved the popular letters to awkward places...

01:08...so they could slow the typists down to avoid that kind of jamming up.

01:17And why is that, that we today, with electronic keyboards, we still keep that legacy design of the keyboard to this very day?

01:28Why do we do that?

01:29Well because we're so used to it.

01:32In fact, we're so used to it that we're actually blinded by that design.

01:37We can't even see anything different.

01:39Well, there's a term for that kind of blindness, and it's called scotoma.

01:46Well it's a medical term, and it means tunnel vision.

01:49But it's also sort of a psychological emotional term that means a failure to see what's before our very eyes.

01:59A scotoma. It's a new word for you.

02:02Well, I worked for the utility company, and I can tell you this, there are scotomas all over the place in utility companies.

02:09But I want to talk about one specific scotoma that has to do with mapping and GIS.

02:16Well, maps have been used for many, many years in the utility company...

02:20...and what they did, they used the maps for was to kind of locate their stuff, their wires, their cables, the valves, and all that stuff.

02:26And they put it on the maps.

02:29And the original maps had sort of India ink on linen and then pencil on Mylar and then computer-aided design, and today, GIS.

02:41Funny thing.

02:43The old linen maps look an awful lot like the GIS maps, and why is that?

02:48Well utility companies want to make sure that these maps look the same through the ages.

02:54And not only look the same but actually they use the maps in sort of the same way.

03:00And what they have built is a scotoma to the possibilities of GIS.

03:07GIS isn't about, you know, finding out what I already know.

03:10It's about discovering, finding something new like...

03:14...where are there places in my infrastructure where a single event could take the whole system down?

03:22That reminds me of this story.

03:25I said I worked for the utility company in the northeastern part of the United States...

03:29...and that's a tough place to run a utility business, I can tell you this...snow storms and ice storms and, you know, hurricanes...

03:37...all kinds of stuff.

03:39Well I had this guy working for me and his name was Stanley.

03:44And every single day Stanley had to make a decision.

03:48And the decision was this.

03:51As the crews came back from their sort of normal daily work, he had to decide...

03:58...do I keep the crews on overtime in case something bad happens and, you know...

04:02...we're in New England and something bad a lot of times happens, or do I send them home?

04:07Do I keep it on overtime or do I send them home?

04:10And the way he did this was, he would gather up all kinds of data so he'd get the weather forecast...

04:17...and then he'd talk to his supervisors, and then he might figure out in his head, oh, you know...

04:22...we haven't maintained this part of the system or we haven't trimmed trees.

04:26And he would gather all of this data in his head, then he would organize that data by location...

04:34...then he would do sort of a risk profile and then he'd make a decision.

04:37So he'd walk into my office and he'd say, Bill, we're going to keep two crews or five crews or, nah, we're going to send them all home.

04:46And in all the years that I knew Stanley, he was almost always right.

04:51But what was he doing in his head, right?

04:53He was doing spatial analysis.

04:59Then Stanley retired.

05:03All of that experience, all of that knowledge, all of that data just simply walked out the door.

05:11What're we going to do?

05:13Well we have GIS and all of the capabilities that we've been seeing today, gathering data, spatial analysis.

05:20And so, think about it.

05:21Think about that I could go outside the utility company, grab a fire map and then maybe look at bridge damage.

05:28You know, I got these big old trucks and I don't them to drive over weak bridges.

05:32And I combine all of that stuff, just like Stanley did, to produce this map.

05:38Simple map but it's brand new.

05:41The red is where it's really bad.

05:43The green is good.

05:44And the orange is kind of in between.

05:46So now I can make a decision about what to do.

05:49Spatial analysis. GIS to transform the business.

05:53And I believe that when people remove those scotomas, innovation and transformation can happen.

06:01So I've got one final story for you.

06:03When I was with the utility company, we used an ancient form of communication, ancient.

06:10Made popular by Native Americans.

06:12Anybody know what it is?

06:15C'mon.

06:16[Audience comment] Smoke signals.

06:17Smoke signals. That's right.

06:19And here's how it worked.

06:21When a transformer would blow up and catch on fire, we knew exactly where the problem was because we saw the...

06:28[Audience comment] Smoke.

06:29Smoke. That's right.

06:30Well we don't want to do that anymore.

06:32We want to use GIS and spatial analysis to find out where the fire will be before we see the smoke.

06:42And so, your opportunity really is to use GIS to peel away those scotomas for innovation and transformation.