Harnessing the Power of Your Data Through Enterprise Location Intelligence
The global economic downturn has caused business to rethink their strategies for effectively managing customer relationships in a meaningful and profitable way. It has also led to a shift in the way businesses leverage location intelligence for everyday collaboration and communication among stakeholders.
Location intelligence comprises a set of competencies (data, insight and strategy) that are brought together in products and solutions to provide the basis for analysis, prediction and information visualization. Sharing this information in a geographical context can lead to actionable intelligence for executing successful organizational strategies.
These products and solutions help businesses define strategies based on a real world understanding of the interaction of those services in the geography and communities they operate in. Through robust understanding of this interaction, organizations have the ability to grow profits and/or control cost by delivering better services than their competitors and optimizing service or asset networks based on a prediction of future trends.
However, in order for this to be effective, there needs to be a centralized operational and collaboration platform that ties together the internal employees and external customers, partners and citizens. Although the concept is not new, its implementation is still not fully mature.
Web 2.0, location intelligence and geospatial technology are critical elements in the transformation of any organization from an isolated entity to a fully networked enterprise as part of a well connected business ecosystem. By utilizing these enterprise capabilities, both governments and businesses will be able to establish bidirectional channels of communication with citizens and customers and open the company to greater interaction with the outside world.
The enterprise can thus be enabled through location intelligence to deliver geo-spatial capabilities into mainstream business processes and leverage all of its data assets. In addition, visualization of location data provides the geographical context, enabling hidden relationships to be discovered, and the location context to be understood.
This intelligence can than be easily shared, analyzed and reused across all of the different applications thereby increasing the effectiveness of the applications, not to mention reducing costs and increasing productivity.
For example, in the insurance industry, location intelligence information can be integrated into a company’s business intelligence and spatial data management offerings to help their customers better assess and manage risks. It could also be used by telecommunications companies for network planning, sales analysis and control center management. In the public sector, location intelligence can be applied into command and control operational systems for better reporting and crime analysis.
The evolving mapping and visualization, data management and analysis, web services, mobile solutions, insight, strategy, and communication technologies provide a platform for a more efficient and effective decision making processes.
Today, location intelligence is advancing rapidly and providing many solutions and innovations to solve our complex challenges. It is breaking down the barriers between departments, taking location data and turning it into location information that can be shared within and beyond your organization. By driving this additional insight and understanding, enterprises can create actionable intelligence to support strategies and successful implementations.
Stay tuned for more on this topic. In my next post, I’ll provide a more in-depth look at best practices and future directions for actionable intelligence in the enterprise.
