I wrote this yesterday at the AWhere Blog: Geo-Analytics Transforms CA Politics. It’s a story told in ever-increasing zoom about how the Proposition 8 opponents Google Mapped the pro-Prop8 donors. An interesting and intense demonstration of how location intelligence and mapping creates actionable insight.
Final Screen Shot: Street View, Anyone?
We’ve been talking about location intelligence and geo-analytics for a while now, both here and at the AWhere blog. As the economy shifts into epochal distress, every point of leverage much be engaged to create or maintain a competitive advantage. The other choice is the drama felt by every company gracing the front page of the business section of their local newspaper (if that company is still in business).
New tools — like AWhere’s suite of location intelligence software and services — are evolving just in time to keep pace with the increasing complexity of business. As we face a new turbulence (it turns out the volatility of volatility is increasing) in the markets, it’s going to take the ability to ask — and quickly answer — new questions from your data in order to keep pace.
As I wrote at the AWhere Blog:
AWhere President Jim Pollock has had most of his attention on our CPG Visions, a custom tool produced for category managers and business strategists in consumer packaged goods and retail. He points out that it would take the average analyst roughly 200 hours of focused analysis to produce a report including the level of complexity of our CPG Visions output, which maps incoming data from WalMart’s Retail Link service, and correlates it to Neilsen demographic data along with National Weather Service weather forecasts (more detail here). Given the workload of a small (and shrinking) analysis team, it’s the kind of work that cannot necessarily be justified on a weekly basis.
But once it’s only a matter of looking at this information on an interactive map, the ability to ask “what if” scenarios and plan for multiple futures becomes a very real business practice.
Business intelligence dashboards provides a mere fraction of this ability, but the principle is the same. When you can see your data — over time, and correlated with external info — and then ask it questions and pose scenarios, you gain a new level of understanding about your business, and that competitive advantage to lift your business during this crazy time.
I think we can expect many discussions in the next year about IT as a transformative force for business in these challenging economic times.
It’s been a great summer over at AWhere, where breakthroughs in geo-analysis, location intelligence and busines map mashups have come one right after another.
What’s the nuance?
The power of location intelligence and data visualization is coming on strong. With projects touching the likes of WalMart and the UN Foundation, AWhere is poised to really take off in the next six months.
We expect that business mapping and next-generation of geo-web applications will become one of the big business process stories of 2009. Thought leaders are on board. The system conditions have changed. Tidal wave to follow.
News junkies, commodity traders and climate change scientists are all tracking last week’s midwest flooding, noting the confluence of impacts, including global commodity prices, US food costs, regional property damage, ethanol futures. All of this is, of course, written in the context of the upcoming US election, and all the subterfuge within.
Over at AWhere (more here, here and here), they spent the week putting together a pretty cool package that allows individuals to make maps specific to any frame of reference. Rather than relying on the media or on other mapmakers to tell you how to think about the flooding, you can interact with the map, ask it questions, and determine for yourself the impact on your business, life, community or other perspective.
What’s the nuance?
Data visualization is one of the most important frameworks for gaining insight. But professional mapmakers have owned a near-monopoly over the frame of reference since mapping began. Now the power is in your hands. Google Maps, Google Earth and Virtual Earth have set the stage for interacting with maps. AWhere takes this evolution to the next step, and lets you plot your data (as many layers as you can generate) on to a map, creating your own view of things.
(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.