2 areas I wish we talk about more in Earth observation:
1. RoI and opportunity costs of using EO
2. Benchmarking and trade-offs in EO
Some thoughts and learnings from building EO adoption strategies for end-users from different verticals 🧵
1. RoI and opportunity costs
What is the value ($) of using EO? What does it bring to the organisation? How are the insights derived from EO more efficient than the method already being used to solve that problem? How many $ will this bring or save over the next few years?
Cost-benefits analysis of doing more than a pilot project? The opportunity cost of not investing in EO today - whether it is to buy off-the-shelf products or build in-house? What is my organisation missing out on (in $), if I do not decide to integrate EO into the workflow?
2. Benchmarking and trade-offs
The "satellite costs are going down and we are launching more EO satellites than ever before" is a good attention grabber. But, what is important for the end-user are the real differences between a 1B $ govt mission and a 1M $ private satellite...
The benefits of using higher quality data, what they are missing out on by not using commercial data, the trade-offs of going with different data sources based on price, quality, reliability, accuracy etc., what risks they are taking and what this means for their bottom line...
Benchmarking different sensors, data sources and platforms based on criteria they care about, trade-offs for choosing between buying off-the-shelf EO-derived products vs building EO-derived solutions in-house or a mix of both, risks of outsourcing EO vs benefits of insourcing ...
All of this holds for most end-users I speak with, but particularly those who don't have in-house EO expertise (that is a big majority of them).
Unless we build efficient and effective ways to answer some of these questions, I wonder adoption of EO can ever be scalable!