Could GIS prove to be BI’s missing link?

Geographic business intelligence is a hot topic in forward-thinking organisations these days and for good reason too. As organisations of all sizes successfully use it to make faster, more precise decisions and to eliminate much of the risk from inherently uncertain undertakings, such as launching new products and deploying new stores, it is naturally attracting considerable interest. From retail to financial services and tourism to the public sector, more and more organisations are starting to wake up to the potential of location-intelligent solutions.

Fundamentally, geographic business intelligence is a merging of conventional business intelligence (BI) and geographic information systems (GIS). It is an exciting merger because it enables organisations to exploit the strengths of both: the ability BI platforms have to “expose” the data within an organisation and make it available in a useful, malleable manner, and the way GIS applications are able to present large amounts of aggregated data in visual, context-rich maps. In conjunction, the two can arm an organisation with a powerful new way of making fast, accurate decisions and assessing risk.

The missing link
In many respects, GIS is the crucial “link” that has been missing from BI for many years. BI generates the numbers, but, without GIS, a lot of the decisive context is missing because, as the saying goes, “everything is happening somewhere”. In other words, it is often simply not enough to know what is happening. To properly understand why it is happening, you also need to know where it is happening.

The visualisation of data is another exciting advantage offered by geographic business intelligence. As well as being able to spatially analyse the data in the BI repository, the GIS applications are able to visually represent the data and plot it on maps. As research has shown, this makes it easier for decision makers to interpret the data and “see” what the numbers are saying.

A lot of the power of geographic business intelligence is derived from the fact that geography is a dimension of just about every business transaction, from manufacturing and transportation costs, to taxes and prices, it even impacts customer churn and retention. Coupled with the vast amounts of data companies are collecting at every level of their business these days, it is easy to see why the predictive efficacy of geography and spatial analytics within corporate databases is being so eagerly sought after.

Barriers to adoption
Given their obvious potential, why are solutions driven by geographic business intelligence still relatively few and far between? The main reason is that, despite the significant in-roads made recently, the two competencies – BI and GIS –  do not talk to each other. Although one or two off-the-shelf solutions are starting to appear, most organisations sit with legacy systems that need to be integrated and that kind of bridging is beyond such solutions’ capabilities.

Adding to the complexity is the way most organisations collect and store the vast amounts of data within them. It is often distributed across the enterprise in silos –  data collection systems linked to databases in proprietary formats –  that require specialised skills and tools to classify, transform and match the data before it can be successfully integrated.

Another reason is that many organisations and BI vendors have tried to produce “quick and dirty” geographic business intelligence by simply bolting an information bridge onto their geospatial data assets, but this is obviously not an effective approach or one that will yield the results and actual value the host organisation is after.

Pack leaders will profit most
Despite the challenges of geographic business intelligence, it is proving to be an irresistible ambition for organisations seeking genuine competitive advantage. It produces efficiencies and certainties that are even more critical in the current economic climate and more and more organisations are changing the way they do business after being exposed to its potential.

As a result, it is highly likely there will be a proliferation of solutions promising to successfully marry BI and GIS within a few years, but, as is typically the case when a powerful new technological approach matures, the organisations that are the real winners will be the frontrunners that successfully exploit the systems and data they have right now.