Building a GIS Competency

A Conversation with Nigel DeFreitas and Mike Goodside

Nigel DeFreitas is a managing architect in ISO's Software Projects Department, and Mike Goodside is an enterprise architect in ISO's Systems Engineering Department. ISO Review recently sat down with DeFreitas and Goodside to find out their approach to adopting GIS, GIS industry trends, and lessons learned, as well as their thoughts on building a GIS competency.

How do you define GIS?

Nigel DeFreitas: GIS is a technology that incorporates geographical features with data to map and analyze real-world problems. It combines the "where" (location and geography) with the "what" (business events and attribute data). That means a portion of the data is spatial and is in some way referenced to geographic locations on the earth. Information about a business event, or attribute data, is generally defined as additional information about each of the spatial features. For example, in an automobile insurance policy, the insured's home address is the spatial data, while the insured's name, insured amount, and coverages all represent attribute data. By combining those two perspectives and performing geoanalytics, we are able to use location context and awareness to understand where and why things have happened in the past. Knowing this may also help insurers predict what and where events will happen in the future.

Please explain ISO's approach to adopting GIS.

Mike Goodside: ISO has delivered Public Protection Classification (PPCTM) codes and wind-damage-related ­infor­mation spatially for more than ten years — first through our Geographic Underwriting System (GUS®) product, and later, beginning in 2004, via its replacement, our LOCATION® product. However, we felt the need to offer richer geoanalytics capabilities and thus created a geoanalytics grand strategy. The first milestone on our road map was to hire GIS talent in the form of a business analyst and GIS application prototyper who could work with our management team to flesh out product ideas and guide our IT staff regarding GIS product capabilities. Next, we tapped into our local academic GIS community to train our management and IT staff on GIS basics. Then we engaged our outsourcing partners to provide a GIS administrator and a software developer capable of building an enterprise-class geographic information system.

What business challenges did you pinpoint when offering geoanalytics to insurers?

DeFreitas: The opportunity from our standpoint was to offer insurers the capability to apply geoanalytics to their books of business, thereby allowing them to see where events were occurring on their policies. For instance, studying areas with a high distribution of risks (risk concentration) or clusters and density of policies could help insurers better spread their risks — particularly if the areas were also high in crime or prone to natural disasters such as earthquakes and wildfires. We felt that using geoanalytics could also help insurers identify gaps in low-risk areas that might present underwriting opportunities or markets they could benefit from. We could do this by using the policy location as an anchor and add supplemental data layers that would help us analyze the risk in the context of its location.

Goodside: We chose ESRI as a base technology because of its rich geoanalytics capability. In addition, our enterprise ­archi­tecture strategy dictated that we write our software using the Java programming language whenever appropriate because of Java's cross-platform properties. ESRI's platform supported Java as an option.

ISO's FireLineTM product is available as an online report that plots a series of concentric circles around an address and shows detailed information on fuels, slope, and road access.

To build the FireLine Report product, we needed to create two images — one that showed a satellite image of the area with its vegetation and another that fused a street layer with ISO's FireLine layer. This side-by-side approach allows our customers to visualize their risk exposure for any given property (see Figures 1 and 2).

How has ISO embraced geoanalytics as a strategic initiative?

Goodside: At ISO, we've made a significant investment in both hiring GIS talent and building a technology platform to extend our GIS capabilities. We call this platform LANDSCAPE. It consists of ISO's proprietary data, third-party data, and public-domain data (much of which can be found at www.data.gov). Issues such as data freshness and accuracy are dealt with uniformly, and all related maintenance processes are in place to ensure proper environment performance and upkeep.

We use the platform as a launchpad for delivering all our geoanalytics solutions to the insurance industry. GIS data on the LANDSCAPE platform includes FireLine and Public Protection Classification from ISO, crime data from CAP Index, Tele Atlas street and roadbase layers, InfoUSA business names, DigitalGlobe satellite imagery, and earthquake fault lines and U.S. census data from the public domain.

This platform gives us the advantage of building new products quickly, in part by simply adding new data sets or layers. ­LANDSCAPE allows us to reuse our GIS infrastructure investment.

DeFreitas: During the first three years, we used our consulting partners for software development and GIS administration. To ensure that our products and LANDSCAPE platform were built correctly, we engaged a third-party GIS consulting group to perform a detailed architectural, design, and code review of our systems. We also sent our developers and management team to an introductory GIS class on using the vendor's product. The class, offered by a local university, was the first step to initiate our staff. It really helped us prepare for the LOCATION Analyst project.

Please provide an overview of LOCATION Analyst.

DeFreitas: LOCATION Analyst is a system that allows an insurer to apply geoanalytics to an entire book of business by looking at several layers of proprietary and third-party data geolocated within the insurer's policies. In large part, the system uses book-of-business data that the insurer has already submitted to ISO for other purposes. It consists of a desktop application and a server-based back end.

In the conception phase, we began with a set of possible ­geo­analytics scenarios that our business analyst then prototyped. Scenarios that made the most business sense made it into our requirements specification. Next, our application architecture staff ran several proof-of-concept exercises on ­possible architectural solutions to the requirements to see which approach and software components would work best.

A large part of the system's construction dealt with extracting the customer's book of business and pairing it with ISO's proprietary layers and third-party data. For that we used traditional J2EE developers. For parts of the system that required specialized GIS knowledge, we hired an ArcMap extensions developer and an ArcGIS Server developer. Early in the construction phase, we engaged an external GIS consulting agency to perform an audit and validate our system architecture, design, and construction.

What industry trends are affecting the development of GIS?

Goodside: By taking a look at the world of social media, we find applications like Foursquare and Trapster, which offer location-based services to users in return for their position (real-time latitude and longitude) and ask for user input (crowd sourcing), such as identifying police speed traps. Photographs taken on most smartphones, as well as Twitter updates sent from them, may also retain the location (geotagging). In addition, mandates by the FCC, such as Enhanced 911, now require wireless carriers to be able to locate a caller so that the appropriate emergency responders can be notified (GIS regulation). Some of those trends will eventually make their way into the enterprise, and it will change the way insurers assess risk and interact with their customers.