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Welcome How a Dose of Data Reality Can Enhance Your Region’s Competitive Positioning Fiscal Impact Analysis Creates a Win-Win for Projects and Communities Economic Gardening: Using Information to Help Your Entrepreneurs Grow Using Location Intelligence to Attract Retail to Underserved Areas Targeting a Portfolio of Clusters Quantifying the Creative Economy Economic Developer “Dinosaurs” Vs. Fast Internet Information Your Regional Knowledge Economy Strategy: Is it Succeeding? “We Have the Site, But We Need the Workforce!”  Subscribe
About Economic Development America
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Economic Developer “Dinosaurs” Vs. Fast Internet Informationby Anatalio Ubalde, MCP, Chief Operating Officer, GIS Planning
As a result, many traditional industries have had to adapt because business as usual could spell their ruin. Economic development organizations (EDOs) are not immune from this information transformation and are figuring out how to compete in a dynamic business environment. EDOs that get in early to use new technologies for their work and capitalize on the opportunities that new information communication makes possible can create a competitive advantage. Alternatively, those that ignore new technology and data opportunities will have to play catch-up, or potentially become irrelevant. If companies can’t get the information they want from economic developers, they will simply bypass EDOs to find data from alternative sources, which are more accessible than ever. So economic developers must ask themselves these important questions: “How is information technology changing our work, the work of our competition, and the expectations of our customers?” and “How can information technology help us?”
Historically, people have made a lot of money from being information middlemen. They created value knowing information that was not readily available to others and by brokering transactions. But the Internet has spurred a new trend resulting in the disintermediation of many occupations such as travel agents, stockbrokers and car salesmen, due to the transparency of information which allows people to go directly to the source. Some professionals – including some economic developers – are trying to hold on to old models of doing business by hoarding information, with the hope that the absence of information will force customers to call them. They have not adapted to a model in which they freely provide information that will lead customers to want to talk to them. I often hear economic developers make this statement: “I don’t publicly give out information about my community because businesses need to call me so I can explain it to them.”What these economic developers don’t realize is that because they don’t give the information out, they aren’t going to get called at all.
Economic developers who resist sharing information need to reconsider their strategy because their competition is already adapting. They freely give detailed information and provide Internet tools so that businesses can analyze the benefits of their area. Their tools include Web sites with searchable databases of sites and buildings, site-specific demographic analysis reports, business lists mapped by industry, and interactive mapping tools to identify the best business locations.1 EDOs that provide these resources are getting called for more information. Take FedEx’s expansion, for example. It used Honolulu’s Web site to gather much of the needed information using an interactive mapping program, and realized Honolulu might have specialized data it could use as well. So they called the EDO and were able to get what they were looking for. Lisa Gibson, then-COO of Enterprise Honolulu, described the experience saying, “We have a wonderful example of a major mainland company that used our GIS application in its search, and that is FedEx as they were researching sites in Honolulu. They started with our site, so it’s proven useful already.”
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