By Philip Duplisey, Director Consulting Services
Your company is already doing GeoBI or Geospatial Business Intelligence. You may not call it GeoBI, and perhaps your systems are clunky and difficult to use, so even the association with the word “intelligence” might be over-reaching, but think about it. Your customers are located in sales regions, countries, states and counties. Your vendors, your distributors, your warehouses are all geo-located, because they represent something physical and tangible, a place you can visit. It is only natural then, to want to see business metrics and KPI’s by these dimensions. GeoBI is business intelligence that makes use of geospatial information, and business intelligence supports better business decision making leading to new revenue opportunities, improved cost visibility, and better risk management through the use of data visualizations of charts, graphs and tables.
Consider for example, “Sales and Gross Margin by Sales Territory”, or “Fuel Costs by Transportation Lane”. These are examples of metrics Bardess has been building for years for clients, and they share one common attribute, a geospatial component. What makes GeoBI particularly compelling, is the use of maps presenting complex data to business users. Not only is everyone familiar with maps and how to read them, but visualizing business metrics on a map is both intuitive and insightful. Some business insights can only be discovered when presented in a map visualization.
Bardess has extensive experience helping customers make better use of their geospatial data. Whether it is geo-coding customer addresses, building a web service to calculate “road miles” using the Google maps API, or integrating data from a geospatial database into one of the data discovery tools, Bardess can help. In the coming weeks, this blog will feature a comparison of how Tableau, Spotfire and QlikView handle Geospatial analysis, and a discussion on shapefiles, a geospatial vector data format commonly used by geographic information systems.
Check out the follow up blogs to this one….
About the Author
Philip Duplisey, Director of Consulting Services at Bardess, has been implementing enterprise wide solutions globally at Fortune 500 companies for 15 years. He enjoys enabling the organization to find value in their data, and presenting that data in compelling ways that lead to deeper insights and improved performance.
