Pub. 13 2018 Issue 1

www.ucls.org 4 Issue 1 2018 / UCLS Foresights J ust over 30yearsago, thefirst desk - top GIS product was produced. In the years that followed, GIS began to be used in many different industries, including land planning and development. For the most part, in the beginning, GIS was seen by surveyors as an overview tool and as a precursor to development in surveying the chain of events. Survey - ors used (and some still do) phrases like “Generic Information Surveying” and “Get It Surveyed” to describe what they thought GIS was. I have even seen GIS depicted as finger painting in a meme describing what surveyors think of GIS professionals. Fast forward to today and Sala - ry.com indicates a GIS professional, with less experience, makes on av - erage significantly more money than his more experienced land surveying counterpart. I don’t want to get into the many possible reasons for this, other than to say that seeing this is highly concerning, especially know - ing that 30 years ago the surveying profession had an opportunity to em - brace GIS and incorporate it into the surveying profession. We didn’t, and today many of the tasks that a sig - nificant number of GIS professionals perform on a daily basis fall square - ly within what I would consider to be land surveying. Unfortunately, “the toothpaste can’t be put back in the tube.” There is no way we are going to convince state legislatures and licensing boards to go after the GIS community for creating maps that include property lines on them, re - gardless of the accuracy. We must simply move on, realizing that a por - tion of our profession has been taken from us, mostly due to our own apa - thy and arrogance. So, if there is no solution to the above problem, you might be asking why I’d bring it up, or maybe I’ve bored you already and you stopped reading after the fourth line. Well for that I apologize, but often when we chose not to make some - thing important, it becomes boring. Quite frankly, I think all land surveyors should find the details of our professional erosion important. If you find a discussion of it boring (not specifically my discussion of it, you are welcome to that, as most people close to me find me rather boring, but the general idea of it boring), then quite frank - ly, you may be part of the problem. This topic cannot be boring, or in 30 years we’ll all be greeting people at Wal-Mart (not that there is anything wrong with that). Back to our professional erosion –why did land surveyors ostracize andmarginalize GIS professionals rather than embrace and incorporate them? How can we learn from this serious mistake and pre - vent it from happening again? Well we already have at least one more “tooth - paste” moment in the last 15 years, and that is machine guided control. Once again, the activity, knowledge and ed - ucation behind it that has historically been a part of surveying has been tak - en from our profession. Our profession, for the most part, stood idly by and let it happen. If you don’t agree with me that it is a surveying activity, read your state code defining land surveying. The items it describes mostly reference the BY JAMES COUTS, PLS 2018 UCLS CHAIR Thoughts from the Chair