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.