This is a transcript of a Webinar hosted by InetSoft entitled "Geographic Business Intelligence." The speaker is Mark Flaherty,CMO at InetSoft.
Mark Flaherty (MF): I am going to show some examples that should serve as food for thought about how you can use geography in a business intelligence solution. First some background on geographic information systems, or GIS, technologies. Where is GIS today? GIS is no longer a departmental desktop point solution used by a small number of individuals in an organization.
It is much more of an enterprise solution. Both the use of geographic information systems and the technology developed in that direction. Within the public sector, for instance, governments have recognized the importance of geography and location to analyze the performance of programs by locale and be able to address problem areas more readily.
Today we see this trend continuing. One of the models, you might call a federated model, where a GIS is shared with many other enterprise applications. Here is a chart from a market research firm. They surveyed 60 enterprise managers from the private and public sectors. The light bars are showing what people perceive as an increase in GIS applications, and the darker bars are where people have reported they see a trend towards GIS integrating with other enterprise systems. What we see is a key systems to integrate with is business intelligence. So we are heading into a time when we see a second generation of BI applications that broaden and deepen GIS throughout the organization.
So where is business intelligence today? Well I am only going to cover this very briefly. We’ll get some more on business intelligence in a minute. Business intelligence is essentially a suite of applications that allows access to disparate sources of an organization’s data. Clearly it’s relatively easy to get data out of a structured system like a database. One of the benefits of business intelligence is that it can mine data, not just from the structured sources, but unstructured data, too, such as spreadsheets or Web services via XML, for instance, and mash them together in a way that produces meaningful information for a wide variety of users in an organization. It’s not just the headquarters, but also staff, sometimes customers and suppliers, that are taking advantage of these rich applications.
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