Esri Community Member Spotlight: Krishna Murthy
This monthly series of member spotlights features you and your peers here in Esri Community—the people playing a role in finding solutions, sharing ideas, and collaborating to solve problems with GIS. We’re doing this to recognize amazing user contributions, to example how Esri Community’s purpose is being brought to life, and to bring depth to this group of incredible people who may never meet in person, but who benefit from each other’s generous expertise.
A Place for the Novice and the Adept
Arguably, the most fundamental circumstance where supportive relationships make a difference is at the very beginning of a new journey. A prime example would be when someone enrolls as a student of GIS, beginning the difficult work of getting their bearings amidst a whole new world of thinking. Who among us hasn’t attended a formal orientation designed to help get some legs under us?
A not-so-secret goal of an orientation, though, isn’t to relay the rules and show fresh faces where they can find help documents … it’s to spark the process of connecting people to each other. To plant the seeds of collaboration, reliance, and experience sharing.
That’s where Krishna Murthy (@sri_krishnahari), began his own GIS journey while working on a Geoengineering degree in 2008. It was at that early stage of his undergrad that he crossed paths with a predecessor of what is now Esri Community.
He recounted those early days in an interview with our team, “Any time you search for a GIS question [Esri Community is] the first thing that comes up. [I found a] lot of people like me who were just new to GIS, learning stuff. There’s a lot of collaboration going on.”
14 years on, with a master’s degree in Geospatial Science behind him and now heading the GIS team at Beans.ai, Krishna continues to lean on the resources provided by Esri Community even as his industry knowledge has dramatically evolved.
Providing a Foundation for Product Development
Beans.ai is an Esri Partner, meaning it’s an organization that, through their expertise, solutions, services, and content, help others leverage ArcGIS technology.
Among their product lineup is a solution that uses ArcGIS 3D Analyst and ArcGIS Indoors data to supply walking directions that can take users throughout indoor locations, going beyond road direction solutions that have become so familiar. A map gallery submission showing the product even won a People’s Choice Award at Esri User Conference 2022.
Indoors for Apartments is an award-winning Map Gallery submission by Krishna and the Beans.ai team
During the beginning stages of product development, Krishna and his team of developers were doing a lot of research that primarily revolved around ArcGIS Network Analyst and how it would mesh with 3D models. Numerous questions emerged throughout the process—during which Esri Community was among their leading resources for getting quick, helpful answers. Krishna identified what an advantage Esri Community’s worldwide membership can be, pointing out that it’s even possible to post and receive a response during what’s the middle of the night for him.
With the Esri Community platform as a bedrock in his resource ecosystem, Krishna has found that his team’s questions are often resolved within a short 5-10 minutes—whether that’s via a response from another customer, an Esri team member, or, often, simply finding an existing question and answer post that addresses what they’re after.
Finding Question posts with answers is made easier by using the "Solved" filter in a search.
And when it comes to looking through Esri Community’s large database of already-compiled questions and answers, Krishna makes sure to leverage the platform’s most helpful features in his search.
“Anytime there is a technical question that I have, it most likely has already been answered so I don’t have to go through all of that research trying to figure out the nitty gritty details of it.” Krishna shared. “Somebody has already done the research for me, and I can just plug it in and get the answer. I just go to the Solution URL that [Esri Community] always [has], that will just take me to the answers.”
Making the Future with Esri Community
Working at a company that develops new, innovative products can sometimes present an interesting challenge: the need to conceptualize tools and resources that may be needed down the road but don’t exist yet.
" I would try to go six months ahead of the product plan that we have.
I try to think of things that we might need and if it's something
that Esri has not already built, I would just make that as an idea and
post it into the Community so that by the time Esri builds up that
idea into a feature into the solution, we've already
synced up on the product map. "
From that future-facing position, Krishna has made a practice out of imagining what yet-undeveloped ArcGIS features could make brand new things possible in Beans.ai products. This exercise gives him time to make the case for enhancement ideas and to champion their value with Esri product teams.
“I would try to go six months ahead of the product plan that we have. I try to think of things that we might need and if it’s something that Esri has not already built, I would just make that as an idea and post it into the Community so that by the time Esri builds up that idea into a feature into the solution we’ve already synced up on the product map.”
While feature requests submitted to the ArcGIS Ideas Exchange aren’t guaranteed to be implemented in a new product version, a great many are. In fact, more than 600 ideas contributed by Esri Community members have been implemented in products in the last two years alone. This is further supplemented by investment in a new Esri Community role focused on facilitating and expanding ArcGIS Ideas' impact.
Whether he’s bringing forward an idea himself or a member of his team, Krishna’s embrace of that opportunity to get requests on Esri’s radar represents a cycle of partnership that doesn’t just benefit Beans.ai. It accelerates the advancement of GIS.
Krishna Murthy is Head of GIS at Beans.ai, an Esri Partner. He and his team of developers create location intelligence products with the use of ArcGIS. With fourteen years of Esri Community use, Krishna has made the platform a go-to resource for finding answers to questions and championing new product features that hasten the GIS of tomorrow.