ABSTRACT
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Information Technology (IT) has become the central decision support tool for managers in the
twenty-first century. Through faster information access, processing, and data management, they
provide greater promises of efficiency, effectiveness, and control over human decision making
capacity. For managers dealing with data tied to location, Geographic Information Systems
(GIS)
have opened unprecedented opportunities and new avenues of decision making research
(Longley et al., 2001; Rodriguez-Bachiller and Glasson, 2004; Craig, Harris, and Winer, 2002;
Jankowksi and Nyerges, 2001). Dramatic increase in the use of GIS is becoming increasingly useful
for decision makers who can routinely make use of digital maps and multidimensional graphical
dictionaries to examine, for example, race and income characteristics of an urban area, or study the
proximity relationships between crimes, drug use, and HIV clients in different locations within
the region or in any part of the world. According to the e-government survey conducted by the
International City/County Management Association and Public Technology, Inc., GIS is the fastest-
growing e-government activity in local governments (ICMA, 2004). Unlike any other times in
modern history, having disparate datasets in one organized system allows managers to have access
to varied citizen information in their desktops or handheld devices.
