|  | Excerpt from: Globally AWhere
| | | November 20, 2008 | | In this era of volatility and discontinuous change, transforming information into knowledge is paramount to competitive advantage. | You don't have to be an economist to see what's happening in business today. Consumer demand is shrinking, and businesses should expect lower gross revenues and thinner margins, at least for 2009, and quite possibly into the next decade.
How do executives, managers and directors build a competitive advantage when everything is headed in the wrong direction? Certainly, this is a time for the courageous to thrive. Being able to take action while your competitors abandon innovation and growth is a key advantage. But this is no time for experimentation -- you have to know what steps will produce results.
The trouble is exacerbated by the epic scale of the changes that are underway. In many sectors, past results are a bad indicator of future performance. This is the biggest economic down cycle that almost all of us have experienced. Some of the old rules still apply, but which ones, and under what circumstances?
As we have written before, location intelligence provides a new way to look at static data -- seeing business information on a map clearly provides new strategic insights. IBM, Microsoft, Pitney Bowes, ESRI and many others are actively selling these solutions, along side many lesser-known firms.
Geo-analytics is the next obvious step in the evolution of this practice, and it builds on traditional location intelligence in three important ways:
- Time. By connecting to your regular flow of data -- from WalMart's Retail Link, perhaps -- you can not only see changes in discrete information, but visualize complex relationships that only make sense when viewed over time. This helps you recognize patters that can assist in predictive modeling.
- Correlation. By integrating different types and sources of data (including time-sensitive feeds, like weather data), you can see the connection of your internal performance with external factors. This provides standardized benchmarking that helps you triangulate your understanding of "why".
- Interactivity. We think the most important activity enabled by geo-analytics is the ability to interact with a larger volume of data than you can process on spreadsheets. It's one thing for us to give you a static view of it. But when you can manipulate and think up new questions, you should be able to answer them in real time.
AWhere President Jim Pollock has had most of his attention on our Awhere CPG TM, a custom tool we 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 Awhere CPG TM 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.
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