Location, location, location...

Businesses churn out geographic data every day without realising its value. Quocirca's Louella Fernandes shows why the location dimension should be a key part of the business intelligence process.

The global digital age has had a profound impact on consumer access to maps, which are becoming an intrinsic part of everyday life.

We are all familiar with web-based mapping applications such as Google Maps, Yahoo Maps or Microsoft Windows Live Local, as well as 3D maps such as Google Earth or Microsoft Virtual Earth.

Along with GPS devices for leisure, in-car navigation and the emergence of mobile phones and handheld devices that offer GPS services, we are all being exposed to a wealth of location-based information.

The influx of these web-based mapping services and pervasive GPS data is bringing geography to the masses and also stimulating the corporate appetite for exploiting location technology.

How to source geospatial data

♦ Choosing data and where to source it from can be challenging and time-consuming. There are many data providers that promote their own products. These include the location intelligence vendors and the third-party vendors that create the data in the first place.

♦ Using a data consultancy that is vendor-neutral can help define and source the data to address specific requirements.

♦ Here are some issues to address when choosing data:

• Return on investment What is the balance between your investment in reference data and the return from using this data?

• Accuracy and currency How up to date is the data?

• Data content Is it polygons - for example, boundaries - or point data, such as co-ordinate locations? What attributes does it contain? For example, the actual spatial data could be a store location, the attribute data could be store name, size or turnover.

• Updates How often is the data updated or checked?

• Licensing How is the data licensed, and how are updates charged for and provided?

Location is relevant to all companies - it is a common dimension of almost all business information and an important element for many business decisions: Where are my best performing stores? Where are my most profitable customers? Where are my competitors or suppliers? What is the potential revenue opportunity compared with investment costs necessary to enter a new market?

Today, companies are generating volumes of data, almost all of which have a geographic dimension, captured and processed through myriad business applications such as ERP and CRM systems.

This, combined with the growing use of RFID tagging and GPS technologies to track business assets and events in real time, means that understanding the value and impact of location on business performance has never been more important.

Harnessing business data to measure and analyse performance has long been the mainstay of business intelligence applications.

But despite the proliferation of data that companies generate today, the potential value of the location dimension is often overlooked in the business intelligence process.

With enterprises having access to ever greater volumes of historic data, to get maximum value from it they need to make use of the location element to achieve deeper insights to improve competitiveness and performance.

Understanding the relevance of position is fundamental when deciding on store locations, developing marketing campaigns, tracking and managing assets or designating sales or delivery boundaries. This is the foundation of location intelligence.

Today, geographic intelligence has evolved from the established geographic information systems (GIS) which have long had a dedicated user community, beyond the realm of the expert single user, to enable the broader analysis of location information in an organisation.

The location intelligence market is characterised by the growing trend to integrate geospatial capabilities into enterprise systems and business processes.

Alongside vendors of enterprise location intelligence solutions such as those from Pitney Bowes MapInfo and ESRI, database vendors such as IBM, Oracle and Microsoft have been quick to recognise the power of location data, offering extended spatial capabilities for their database products.

Meanwhile business intelligence (BI) vendors such as Cognos, Business Objects and Information Builders offer some level of geospatial capabilities through partnerships with established GIS vendors.

Other suppliers in this market also offer spatial analysis, through, for instance, integration - or mash-ups - with services such as Google Maps, enabling enhanced dashboard visualisations.

Meanwhile location-based services (LBS) promise to further extend the market for mobile geographic intelligence. The combination of GPS data with business intelligence enables the capture of real- or near real-time information into their enterprise database and applications, improving the decision-making process through using up-to-date, more accurate geospatial data.

Location intelligence solutions extend beyond simply visually representing data on a map. They combine the analytical power of databases with the geographic capabilities of maps, allowing business users to explore and analyse relationships between geographic data and business data.

Through combining the geographic dimension of business data together with external geographic data - such as road networks, place names and attributes, demographic information, or other geographically dispersed data such as hurricane impact areas - location intelligence produces a visualisation in the form of a map that can be explored, manipulated and analysed to unlock the value of 'where'.

Whether it is best-performing stores or sales people, capacity of utility networks, customer and market characteristics or high crime areas, all this information can be placed on a map to understand how it relates to other spatial information such as competitors, consumer segmentation information, daytime population patterns or delivery boundaries.

Companies that are able to exploit the context of this location information can gain valuable insights into performance - not only where they are today but where they should be in the future.

Geospatial analysis requires accurate and relevant data, which is achieved through the integration of an organisation's proprietary data - such as customer records, sales information or delivery routes from disparate databases - and cross-referencing it with third-party reference data.

This data can be either static, such as street or postcode boundaries or customer demographics, or dynamic, such as weather information or traffic reports available through web mapping services. Indeed, the value in location intelligence lies in the effective use of geospatial data.

Although moving to geographic intelligence requires careful assessment, this technology is simply an extension of the business intelligence platforms that many companies have already invested in for their reporting needs.

Firms need to consider where location is relevant to them and get started with spatially enabling their business data, then identify which external data sources would be most appropriate in gaining a fuller picture of the market environment that the organisation operates within.

Although this is not a trivial task, the investment in time spent doing this is outweighed by the benefits of location intelligence, gaining better insight into an organisation's competitive environment, reducing business costs, minimising risk and adding value to operational decisions.

Data continues to drive value today and it is the way in which this data is analysed that sets the most effective business apart from its competitors.

Enterprises should consider the relevance of location to their business and its strategic value to decision making. Only then can they truly realise the benefits of location intelligence.

Quocirca's White Paper on The Location Intelligent Enterprise is available for download.