Last week there was a brief twitter thread in the geo-community about cloning Adam Estrada. It started innocuously, but as such things often do amongst our chatter class of geospatial professionals, it degenerated rapidly. One could only imagine what the world would be like with multiple copies of a rabid Georgia Bulldog fan.

The technology for cloning GeoNerds has been developed.

This thread was followed by some great follow-up discussions from last week’s post on the new parcels in Google Maps (and see a better article here). It seems that our way of life in the professional mapping industry is going to change as a result of new data and technology that will be available at increasingly lower costs. That means that the players in the industry will have to change or die. Or put a little less morbidly, we will need to become increasingly more productive in order to stay ahead of the “free stuff” curve.

Yet, how do we become more productive with our time, e.g. make more money with less effort? Productivity varies across industries, and sectors within industries. Our industry can be basically broken down into three groups – software vendors, data vendors, and professional service vendors. In Adam’s case, he is in the professional service sector, working for Zekiah Technologies, and is in a similar position to many in the geospatial industry wrestling with the problem of being more productive.

The productivity problem with the professional service sector is that it is a consulting business. Revenues are generated as a function of billable hours, e.g. how many hours it will it take you to install an ESRI ArcGIS Server or build a map of Maryland. Therefore, to make more revenues, one has to generate more billable hours. Yet, the billable hours per person has an upper limit, say 40 hours per week (unless of course you are a lawyer, in which case it is greater than the 168 hours available to us mere mortals). And therein lies the conundrum, the professional services industry does not scale beyond the bodies you can hire. This means in the good times your upside is limited to the amount of dollars per hour you can charge times your total workable hours. And in the bad times, you have the fixed overhead of salary support for someone who isn’t fully billed out. Large downside risk, limited upside potential. Not the best of business combinations.

Given this combination, it is easy to see why Adam might wish to clone himself. If he could scale the number of hours he could work to the available billable hours he could sell, and not incur the additional overhead and risk, Adam would be less stressed, and would make more money. Of course he may have to share his Bulldog tickets with his clones, but there are disadvantages to bulldog cloning that I’ll leave for your imagination.

The geo-data industry sector is different. A lot of effort goes into developing the data product, but once developed this product may be sold multiple times. This make-once, sell-many product model is a great example of a scalable business. Like the software business, the cost of development is incurred upfront, after which the only marginal expenses are sales and marketing. In essence, instead of cloning yourself to garner more revenues, you clone your product (which is a bit easier than cloning yourself with today’s technology).

The problem with the data business model is the upfront costs, as well as the sales and marketing expenses once the data product has been produced. These costs can be significant and there is always the risk of, “if you build it, they won’t come.” So while it scales well, the risks are high. Given this risk and expense, many geo-professionals choose to continue along the path of lower risk, but lower upside, consulting business; and like Adam they dream of cloning themselves while working late in the evenings, instead of watching their favorite college football team.

Is there another path? I would like to think so, but it requires a blending of the data and professional services business model. In this new path, people like Adam, who create content (or advanced data transformers and geospatial analysis tools) on a daily basis for others, would retain an explicit stake in their days work at creating valuable content. Much like songwriters, who retain residuals on the songs that they write, GIS professionals who create products for others could retain royalties and derivative rights on their products. These royalties and rights would allow them to resell their works in a manner that would generate new revenues, which would scale far better than the original hours required to produce the original work.

There would need to be some trade-offs for the original purchasers, e.g perhaps they get a lower price for the job if Adam was able to retain the derivative rights to his works. In this case, Adam could bet a little of his current revenue in the hopes of generating a better scalable revenue stream. This would be a win-win for both parties, as the original purchasers would be getting a product a lower cost (and thereby increasing their overall productivity); and Adam would be able to generate more revenue with less effort, which could possibly create a new business model for greater success in our industry.