Adding Location Analytics To Your Enterprise Business Systems Provides Greater Opportunities For Successful Decisions, Guest Series Part 1

By Chris Ovens, director of sales, location analytics, Esri.

Innovative, successful companies discover meaningful patterns in their data to build winning strategies. At more than $38 billion per year worldwide, corporate investment in mining insights from analysis in the business environment is staggering. In fact, $8 billion is being spent on business intelligence (BI) systems alone — CRMs, ERPs, and the tools and applications that break down corporate data silos to enable sharing, collaboration, and near real-time use of this vast sea of data.

Studies have shown that for every dollar spent on analyzing data, the return on investment is tenfold. This may be the reason CIOs cite BI as their number one priority.

Businesses are realizing that their competitive edge can hinge on getting the most knowledge out of their data. One technology that can give them an advantage is geographic information systems (GIS),which helps businesses understand data based on location.

Within the IT world, GIS is often pigeon-holed as a specialized domain of expertise that requires specific training and dedicated analysts. But it is finding its way out of the backroom and into the boardroom, driven to some degree by the exploding consumer use of maps on smartphones. More and more, executives are demanding mapping to support high-level decision making.

The most obvious way to meet, and often exceed, this demand is to incorporate mapping and GIS into the BI environment. This is significant, as many times, location data is the only link between disparate operational systems and data silos.