This is a continuation of the transcript of a Webinar hosted by InetSoft entitled "Geographic Business Intelligence." The speaker is Mark Flaherty, CMO at InetSoft.
Mark Flaherty (MF): Now let’s run through a few examples of the typical uses of integrated geographic and business intelligence that we are starting to see emerge. One of the most common cases is market analysis, understanding your customers, where they are and what are their needs. Although a lot of the language we use here is found more commonly in the commercial sector, the public sector agencies also do similar things with census data. For instance some counties have taken census and mosaic data and used that information to model decisions such as planned location of community centers, walk-in centers, libraries, et cetera, based on the demographic data and based on people’s preferences.
Another well-established application of GI and BI is in customer segmentation. This is an example for a bus operator who is deciding the best route to service a community. They are using census data and data from a user survey about people’s preferences for using public transportation. And they are integrating business intelligence from asset management systems that contain data about bus stops and routes and other facilities. The benefit of this is that they can identify things like well and under served areas. It ensures they best meet the needs of the community.
Quite a lot is happening in the geographic business intelligence world. If you take things like geoprocessing, it allows a much richer what-if capability, something that models more closely the decision-making process people use in the real world. So there are some interesting opportunities for making these types of decisions with what geographic business intelligence can offer you today.
One more example is location intelligence. It takes site location to the next level. These maps use more advanced techniques such as buffer analysis, drive-time analysis and customer flow modeling. What this offers an organization is a number of key benefits. It allows them to evaluate a site before agreeing to purchase it. That’s a risky decision, so anything they can do to de-risk that decision is going to be a benefit. They can also model the effects of that site location.
One of the really big benefits is reducing the reliance on expensive consultants. In the past this kind of anaylsis might have been done by employing a third party consultant to come in. Once this geographic business intelligence is made available, then the enterprise can quickly recalculate and run different scenarios on their own without paying a consultant for each one. Many more what-if options can be looked at than before.
A final couple of examples are management dashboards. This is how you can take GIS to the executive. For a senior executive in an organization, being able to visualize data geographically is perfect. You can combine business intelligence and GIS to look at things like the deployment of a mobile workforce. Insurance inspectors use things like analyzing claims to look at above average pay outs expenses and find adverse behavior. These kind of map-based management dashboards give users a much richer experience and shows them information in a way that might not have been previously possible in traditional business charts.
Copyright © 2024, InetSoft Technology Corp.
