The IBM Environmental Intelligence Suite is an AI-powered SaaS solution that provides intelligence to proactively manage the economic impact of severe weather and climate-change events built on weather data.
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QGIS
Score 9.7 out of 10
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QGIS (formerly Quantum GIS) is a free and open source geographic information system.
I feel IBM Environmental Intelligence Suite (EIS) is well suited for any organization that is growing and developing programs for sustainability and need geospatial type data to work with analytic tools. Being in the energy services space that was very helpful with some of our ESG reporting requirements.
Presented meaningful charts and tables of our climate data in the 4 countries we operate and showed strengths and weaknesses across each market.
Formatted the presentation materials so our team did not have to take the reports and put them into a presentable format. We were able to leverage the technology's outputs in raw form which was very helpful and saved a lot of time.
Applied this to some of our client's data to see how we can better serve their business based off the different climates, environments, and countries they operate in (specifically within the real estate sector which is a large portion of our business).
Styling: the styling engine is fantastic with raster styling features that I recognize from apps like Photoshop.
Print layouts: I can set up custom print layouts, and even do automated multi-page atlas style reports that I use for cycling through detailed areas when providing my clients with pdf reports.
Extendable: the plugins are fantastic, and almost anything I need that isn't provided natively with QGIS is available as a plugin.
Community: the QGIS community is passionate about GIS, and are always ready to help. There are great training resources available online.
Making maps in QGIS is a bit clunky. I also find it to be extremely unintuitive. For basic GIS, it is great, but I would much rather make maps (for publication purposes) in ArcGIS.
Editing and adding feature layers is not very intuitive. Changing colors of added point or line features is a rather convoluted process.
ArcGIS has a huge selection of online courses, and if you have the appropriate license, you can access most for free. I found these to be very helpful when dealing with map projections and other issues. However, QGIS does not have a large library of courses specifically made for that program.
Given the newness of the platform we have struggled with the integration and onboarding as previously mentioned. Not only from getting our team members setup and able to use the platform but also integrating our current systems to be compatible we had to reach out to the customer support team quite a bit.
I wasn't a GIS user at all when I started using QGIS, nor did I have any background working with data in anything other than Excel, and as a result, I struggled quite a lot in the beginning (it's not quite Google Maps). But having said that, I haven't come across anything that I couldn't do with a little help from the online community. I've done complex spatial analyses on large datasets of metropolitan cities, designed custom multi-page pdf reports that automatically cycle through different areas of an area, etc.
And the GIS staff that I've appointed, after their initial resistance, took to the tool like a fish to water, and I haven't heard them complain after starting to use the tool for a week or two.
But if you're new to GIS, be patient and invest some time to learn how to use the tool. It is absolutely worth it.
Even though there is a no dedicated support team for QGIS (or at least we are not aware of it), there is a huge online community and a large number of forums catering to every question you may have regarding any particular functionality of QGIS. So, you have a lot of help available but you will have to sift through it on the web.
QGIS is open source and freely available for Windows and Mac iOS Geographic Information System Software. QGIS is highly customizable as per project requirements and different application usage. QGIS has ample tools and plugins that are useful for the analysis of raster and vector data. It also supports GRASS, GDAL, and SAGA tools.
We were able to scale back our workforce in the EMEA regions due to inefficiencies based off the insights we received.
We had a lot of data we did not know how to use. With IBM Environmental Intelligence Suite we cut back on 40% of our staff's hours to sift the data and analyze. Instead this time was spent loading the tool and analyzing the results as opposed to the more administrative aspect.
Our efficiency metrics (based on internal firm performance criteria) went up by 2 points (35%) for our offshore resourcing once we were able to integrate them into the tool.
QGIS gives us more impactful data on children and maternal health issues, which in turn has helped us establish more programs, relationships, and funding opportunities because of the excellent data presentations we can give.
QGIS has allowed our staff to improve their data analysis skills, improving our workforce across the board, with or without the direct use of geographic data.
QGIS has required a lot of staff time to learn, but the ROI on time spent vs the reports we produced afterward has been well worth it.
