“I knew I’d come back home to Nebraska when I was in Iraq in 2008,” says Joseph Heieck, owner and CEO of the Lincoln-based technology company GIS Workshop. It would take another deployment to Afghanistan and two years at Harvard Business School before his homecoming became a reality. The former Naval Intelligence Officer returned to Nebraska in the summer of 2014 with one goal—to find a company in Nebraska to lead. He found GIS Workshop, a company that specializes in custom spatial applications.
GIS, or Geographic Information Systems, visualizes data on an interactive and digital map, such as GPS navigation. GIS technology was Mr. Heieck’s analytics platform in the Navy. “It’s amazing how much faster you can make an effective decision when you bring your data to life on a map using GIS,” Mr. Heieck says. “I’m glad that I can not only bring the power of GIS to organizations to enrich their decision-making and to make their lives easier, but I can also do it from Nebraska.”
GIS Workshop (www.gisworkshop.com) has been serving several hundred local government and private enterprise clients throughout Nebraska and the Midwest since 1999. They provide GIS solutions for web, mobile, and desktop environments based on the needs of their clients. Mr. Heieck acquired the company in January 2015 upon previous owner’s retirement. He was born and raised in Omaha.