ArcMap Tutorial

The first of the difficulties that I could foresee with this program is that a user could have difficulty remembering all the many operations and commands that it has. It truly takes an expert to become effective with all the aspects of such a user unfriendly program. Although it was difficult to remember all the commands necessary to perform the tasks laid out for us in this simple assignment, it was truly fascinating to see the possibilities that opened up from such a program. The benefits are incredible, such as ease of urban planning, Geologic mapping, hazard mapping and an endless list of other political uses, but the potential pitfalls could be that mistakes are easily made in data entry and are not always easily caught or changed.  Another pitfall is that the data expressed can potentially be very one sided, which can have a large effect on the political use of this software.
This program has a very user unfriendly interface. Some of the essential commands are hidden in right click menus deep within a tab menu. Although there are many options for creation, it might not always be utilized to maximum capability due to the poor organization of the command features.  Although this proved difficult to master, this aspect could actually be a deterrent for novice map makers, as it only allows use by someone who has been trained.
The potential uses for this program are indeed infinite. I believe that every operation in the world, be it governmental , commercial, scientific or any other organization that needs to organize location data would be benefited by having a proficient operator of this software at their command. I am a geologist, and can thus think of several uses for this software just within my limited scope of incomplete undergraduate knowledge. I once shadowed a city planner for the city of Susanville, and now looking at the possibilities of such a program I think that there is no longer any excuse for poor planning.
The pitfalls that I noticed would mostly arise from politics. While making a graph of the land parcel use inside the noise contour from the airport, I noticed that the residential parcels had the most within the parcel area, but the area that they covered were exponentially smaller than the land area that was covered by the agricultural and commercial parcels. While information in this instance was perhaps useful, the way that this information was portrayed could be used in other aspects such as tax mapping and other such pursuits that could be used for special interests to get gain at the expense of others.