George Benwell’s research and teaching covered spatial-information processing, land-information systems and health-related information systems. After surveying, consulting and university teaching in Australia, he joined Otago’s Department of Information Science. He became Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Commerce) and Business School dean in January 2007, retiring from that role in November 2016. His GIS research included the 1995 local-government study co-authored with Andrew Marr.
George Benwell appears repeatedly in the early Otago record, particularly where GIS met organisational and environmental questions. His work with other researchers turned the adoption of GIS into a subject for empirical study. The rapid spread of GIS during the early 1990s produced claims about benefits that researchers tested against organisational experience. Universities could compare users, examine implementation patterns and ask why some systems became embedded while others remained specialist tools.
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Sources and further reading · 3
Indexed passages
- Researching adoptionUniversity teaching and research
- A recurring research forumUniversity teaching and research
- Users organise themselvesCompanies and user groups
- Adoption acceleratesCouncil GIS
- Visualisation and modellingMapping in 3D