So I’m sitting on a west bound train in Union Station in downtown Chicago waiting to head back to Naperville. The problem is, I’m way earlier than I anticipated…
It’s been an extremely disappointing evening as, this being my 1st trip to the Chicago area, I was really looking forward to be sitting in Buddy Guy’s Legends club right now enjoying some good ‘ol Blues… But unfortunately, there was a private corporate event (which btw was NOT listed on their website) going on tonight with Jackson Browne playing. So needless to say, I was devastated when I walked up and saw the ‘Closed for private event’ sign on the door. So I ended up calming my anticipointment in a great Chicago style thin crust pizza.
What does this have to do with the ILGISA Conference you ask? Well, not much… 
So, onto the business at hand.
The ILGISA conference wrapped up this afternoon and was a great experience for my first time attending this event. Albeit, the event wasn’t as busy as I expected, and there are likely a number of factors that contributed to that.
This event is a GIS centric gathering for GIS Managers and Specialists in the Illinois area and it’s no surprise that ESRI is the tool of choice for the attendees. In talking with many of these GIS folks about data sharing between CAD & GIS departments, it was great to hear that many organizations are using AutoCAD Map, and about 1/2 of those people did mention that they were sharing data to some extent via Map and FDO. I’ll admit, that I wasn’t expecting the number to be that high, so that was a nice surprise. Unfortunately, I also found many people that still had the ‘blinders on’ when it came to the topic of CAD/GIS integration. The typical response from these people was usually a shoulder shrug, and a comment like: ‘oh, I use (or do) GIS’. But what is really funny about this, is that these are likely the same people that grumble and/or complain when ‘engineering folks’ ask the GIS department to share some of their information so it can used in their engineering designs.
For years, I have always maintained that people should use whatever tool they need to, to accomplish their daily tasks. The tool should be irrelevant as long as the data is accessible and open. Data is the real asset and with the current offerings on the technology market today this data sharing scenario is no longer a wish, it’s here, now.
Until next time
Take care
Warren M
Comments