Geographic information systems to play key role in BI

By Keith Jones, MD, Harvey Jones Systems

There are a number of significant trends driving management practices today. Deciphering all the consulting jargon is a daunting task for business managers and IT staff alike.

Dashboards, KPIs (key performance indicators), KPAs (key performance areas), balanced scorecards, and corporate performance management are among the latest buzzwords in management practice.

One simple truth abides across this jargon-rich environment - in their quest for better decision-making that will drive up business performance, companies have amassed exploding volumes of information. As a result, two tools are key: data visualisation and digital dashboards.

Data visualisation allows managers to look at large volumes of data and determine anomalies at a glance. The traditional two-dimensional grid view of data is simply inadequate when it comes to disseminating large volumes of the stuff.

Anomalies are either missed completely or spotted too late. In our increasingly volatile and competitive environment, any changes in the marketplace or the business must be spotted and acted on immediately. Data visualisation turns a set of data into visual insight. It aims to give the data a meaningful representation by exploiting the powerful discerning capabilities of the human eye. The data is displayed as 2D or 3D images using techniques such as colourisation, 3D imaging, animation and spatial annotation to create an instant understanding from multi-variable data.

The digital dashboard is a simple way of representing this information in a logical rather than purely physical view of the business. As a user interface the dashboard organises and presents information in a way that is easy to read, integrating information from multiple components into a unified display. The data represented in a dashboard provides a single coherent business view of all or one aspect of an organisation. This allows data from disparate sources to be displayed in a business context rather than a source system context.

Against this backdrop, geographic information systems (GIS) have an important role to play in the business intelligence and business performance management markets going forward. A GIS is a support system that represents data using maps, GIS helps people access, display and analyse data so that it has geographic content and meaning. By displaying key performance information in a geospatial format, a manager can see at a glance which regions are over- or under-performing. If management information is presented in context, a trend can be differentiated from a fad very quickly. If one region is performing well above target in a booming market, this is not noteworthy; but if all new regions are performing equally while all mature regions are performing differently then this too is probably noteworthy.

By segmenting the market and the consumer visually the information becomes immediately valuable - and managers do not have to trawl through pages and pages of printed or two-dimensional reports to spot this information.