The year was 2004. The Bushwar economic debacle was still a looming threat in academic circles, while business and the stock market still thrived.
CFO magazine ran a good article about how mapping and data visualization were crucial to business. Here are a series of quotes and business testimonials that demonstrate the value of location intelligence and geo-analytics.
Overview:
"Academic research shows that we can't keep more than seven data points
in our head at one time," says Dan Vesset, research director for
business analytics at research firm IDC. "If you have a table with more
than seven rows and multiple columns, you very quickly get lost."
Testimonial:
The insurance industry belatedly discovered the power of visual
representation following the September 11, 2001, attack on the World
Trade Center. "There was a tremendous concentration of risk in lower
Manhattan" says James Bisker, director of insurance research at
TowerGroup. "Not just the buildings themselves, but how much was
insured by one company in each building." That data lends itself well
to visual analysis, he says, but "because the information was buried in
tabular reports, it wasn't as obvious."
Expert:
Efforts to present data more effectively have been galvanized by
"spatial information technology," a combination of software,
satellites, sensors, and technologies such as radio frequency
identification tags that enable users to geosynchronize production
inputs and thereby streamline operations, says Susan M. Wachter,
professor of real estate and finance at the Wharton School of Business
at the University of Pennsylvania. "We now have the capacity to
affordably geosynchronize the supply chain; she says. Companies can now
track resources and people in real time, operating "just-in-time" and
"just-in-place?
"This is not just a step up, it's a leap," Wachter says. Retailers
can go beyond zip-code analysis by converting the addresses of known
customers to dots on a map and adding such demographic information as
average incomes and average spending on specific items, such as
furniture or sporting goods. Armed with that view, optimizing the
location of new stores becomes far more accurate. That was the progressive vision in 2004. Today, thousands of companies are using mapping of one form or another in data analysis. Economic times are tougher, budgets are tighter and every decision is more carefully analyzed.
If you want to see some of these strategies and approaches in a real-world application, look no further than our CPG Visions product (news and background), which allows any Wal-Mart vendor take their Retail Link data and map it against demongraphics and weather, just like Dr. Wachter presaged almost a half-decade ago.
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