(note: here’s a version of a piece I ran over at AWhere’s new blog. Check it out for good info on 2008’s biggest trend in business intelligence (BI).)

TechWeb published the Executive Summary of Ventana Research’s new benchmark survey on the impact of location and geo-analytics on business intelligence practices in the enterprise, calling it one of the major corporate trends of 2008.

Essentially, it demonstrates a strong business case for the deep integration of location intelligence and geo-analytics into business analysis in the growing field of BI, though it’s important to notice that it was financed by two of the largest providers of location intelligence software.

Beyond the bromides, there were some interesting revelations that buttress the benefits location intelligence provides.

In one example:

Integration of data, for instance, is a demanding task: 61 percent of organizations need to bring together data from at least five sources, and nearly one fifth of respondents (19 percent) say they need to combine data from 20 sources or more. Furthermore, research participants said that unique individual sources are more important than conventional sources such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, customer relationship management (CRM) systems and data warehouses; spreadsheets (50 percent), flat files (37 percent) and reports (35 percent) all were cited more often than the traditional sources. This reflects the reality that much key business data is stored outside of enterprise sources.

In summary, the researchers laid out the case quite clearly:

When it came to specific business undertakings, the research spotted analyzing customer and demographic information, analyzing location patterns, understanding location-related patterns in operational data, and identifying location relationships as top priorities that can be pursued by anyone in the organization, from management to front-line operational workers, to interpret and evaluate business performance.

Will you join the 65% of enterprises (surveyed by Ventana) who are using location intelligence to beef up their BI?