Integrating Geographic Information Systems in Business School Curriculum: An Initial Example

Geographic information systems have experienced rapid growth and user adoption over the last four decades, due to an increasing value to the business community. However, business schools are not teaching geospatial concepts and the related location intelligence to their students. This curriculum decision seems completely at odds with business’ day-to-day dependence on a wide array of geographic information system applications. Business schools typically teach relational and object-oriented database courses, quantitative methods, decision supports systems, and Visual Basic for Applications, which are all directly related to the basic concepts of geographic information systems. In addition, these concepts are all part of location intelligence, a more business intuitive term than geospatial analysis. Spatial data modeling is discussed and compared to standard data modeling frameworks such as ANSI/SPARC. Geographic standards are introduced, along with an overview of the OpenGIS Simple Features Specification for SQL. A discussion of how to utilize MySQL open source database software for spatial queries is included, along with a comparison to PostgreSQL/PostGIS. Through the use of these software programs and the techniques introduced in this article, it is possible to integrate the concepts of location intelligence into business curriculum without requiring students to learn new GIS-specific programs. Enhancing student knowledge of this subject area through existing skill sets provides for smoother integration of this material into existing curriculum, as these topics could be added into established courses and would not require new courses to be developed.