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Business Intelligence, GIS for business

TRANSLATION NOTES: Please read some comments at the end of this post.

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The case

I saw this software a year ago with some studious (egeomated) friends while they were making a system for an international banking group. Specifically, the matter was to geo-reference account holders’ credit card, which was an odyssey considering that addresses were written almost in rock art.

But the final results were simple routines made for the Bank officers where they could make queries such as:

  • • High Arrears Neighborhoods Map
  • • Suitable Areas for the service agencies installation
  • • Distribution Routes for statements
  • • Attractive areas for the promotion of new products

This is what is called “Business Intelligence”, which are nothing more than procedures to analyze on the flight certain variables and displayed on painted maps. The science is not in the GIS but in the analysis that leads to create criteria for the routines, so it is appropriate to know the business, times, offered products, customers and local conditions.

I remember the multilayer structure made by my intellectual (smoked) friends, were screens for different levels:

For the Marketing Manager: A pane to manage the measurement criteria, such as acceptable arrears percentages, selection criteria for clients, targets at sales, segmentation and positioning parameters…

For GIS technicians, there’s an interface that in companion with the Manifold GUI resulted very economical, because with this, technicians only geo-positioned each new customer, creating new areas, etc.

For managers, an interface with which they could see trends, compare sales against goals, make work plans and receive alerts of achievement or delays.

Results

Usually it’s known as Business Intelligence implementation information for making management decisions. Some of these would be:

  • Why do the majority of crimes come from this area?
  • Where is the right place for the next Mall?
  • Which are the proper points for the cell phone antennas?
  • How much would be the pay – value to neighbor for the improvement made?
  • Where do our sales come from?
  • Why in this colony we have so many arrear customers?

The complexity of this is that it must be programmed, and that’s expensive. It is not expected to be a GIS technician for each analysis making painted maps and the Marketing Manager reviewing the criteria applied. For these tasks are apply routines that return results, where parameters can be customized.

My respect for these technology quixotics (*), I remember they achieved the goal of creating new points on IMS from a Web application, making embedded in the Oracle database and cheating Manifold which refreshed them on the fly.

clip_image002Solution

We know that ESRI has an application for this purpose called Business Analysis, but in this case I want to talk about an application that has left me impressed an application with which I wish to conclude the post; it’s called Map Intelligence, produced by Integeo, a company whose origin is in Australia but with services in different parts of the world including the United States and Spain.

What does Integeo do that makes surprising:

Plugin to integrate MI in Excel!!!

As Excel is an application of popular use, they have created a plugin that allows you to connect to data stored either in Excel or on an external database, and play with an interface that displays the graphical results according to the existing clip_image003information.

It’s possible to play with the layers theming, zoom in or zoom out, turn layers on or off. Data can be displayed from an ArcIMS publication or served from another application with OGC standards such as Manifold, ArcGIS Server, Geoserver…

Integrate Geospatials and Reporting aplications.

Map Intelligence has connectivity with geospatial applications such as ESRI, MapInfo, Geoserver and connects with reporting applications such as MicroStrategy, Oracle / Hyperion, IBM / Cognos, SAS, SAP, Business Objects, Actuate or generated from Eclipse.

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According to the latest news, Sun has bought the product to integrate Hyperion to ESRI, with which it would have an application running on Java, so in Mac and Linux.

Conclusion

At last I think this is a fairly impressive application, mainly because although it is oriented to the GIS end products, fits to specialized data services and generates results on the fly without the need to have high development costs.

If you want to know more, go to Integeo or Integeo Iberia.

TRANSLATION NOTES:

Quixotics: Idealistic persons who are capable to do their best in order to get a goal.

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