Your SpotOn the IBM Cognos Edge

In the time I've been involved in business intelligence, and more recently in GIS and spatial analytics, I've both read and written a lot about "business dimensions". You know, those aspects of the business that underpin analytics and OLAP-driven data exploration. They let business managers answer those niggly little questions, like "where are we most profitable?" or "which projects or divisions have blown the budget with the most reckless abandon?". From there, they can start to investigate "why" by "slicing and dicing" data across business dimensions, like department, product line, cost center, and so on.

But not all business dimensions are created equal. What are the two most critical, most central and fundamental business dimensions?

They are Location and Time.

Think about it. We live in something called a "Space-Time" continuum. Everything in business happens at a specific place and time. These dimensions are fundamental to everything else, and oddly in most cases are somewhat taken for granted.

You can re-org your departments, you can juggle your product lines, you can cleverly allocate marketing budget. But aside from deciding when and where you're going to make things happen, you cannot actually change the location or time dimension. Events still happen today, this week, last week, last year, in whatever cities, states, and countries you choose as target markets.

I mentioned earlier that these dimensions are too often overlooked. I meant by that they're mostly treated just like other more "subjective" dimensions, and I say it because many BI vendors have not paid the attention to these two dimensions that they should or could.

This is especially true of the region or location dimension. There are tools out there that do some pretty neat and useful things with respect to time -- like automatically generating relative time periods (week-over week, year-over-year, and so on) for analysis, or "playing" an animated business measure trend over time. But only fairly recently have spatial concepts like 'location intelligence" started to bubble up into the day-to-day vocabulary of business analysts and BI vendors.

That's a huge part of the reason why, when our customers see their data plotted by region (and/or point) on a map, with intuitive built-in exploration capabilities, they often just can't believe what they're seeing. Typical reactions:

"Why don't we have this now?"

"When can we get this?"

Bringing total clarity to one of two fundamental business dimensions instantly unlocks a lot of the inhibitors to real, fruitful data exploration and analysis. And when you augment the visual clarity of maps with the time dimension that exists in every data warehouse, it's pretty much a slam-dunk. You see what's happening, where, and can instantly filter the view to visualize it for any other business dimension. Or even bring in predictive analytics to see what might happen regionally if you adjust programs, products, resources, and so on.

The Location and Time dimensions. Get your business managers to analyze and understand those, and the rest will follow.

 - dk

I read an interesting article from Directions Magazine today about the relative complexity of modeling certain things to make decisions. The article is interesting in that it states pretty clearly what most of us know about computers and models for decision making: they're pretty reliable... until things get complex to the point where there are no clear boundaries or frameworks for decisions to be made "algorithmically".

The article states that to a large extent, business decisions (in this case, about retail store placement and performance) combine aspects of both art and science. The computer does the grunt computation based on the underlying model (science), while the business user takes what the computer provides and makes the final decision, based on experience and knowledge (art). 

To a large extent, I believe that's what integrating the visual component of maps into BI data enables. It brings to the business user's fingertips all of the carefully modeled, massaged, and tabulated business data that would take a human ages to synthesize. It shows that data as information within in a known physical context where, correlated with spatial influencers (which again, are not easily synthesized except with a map). This information, combined with experience and  sound judgement helps ensure the best decision is made.

There may come a day when Watson's descendants can actually make business decisions (and I have reservations about that, but those belong in another blog). Until then, making information real and easy to consume for those responsible elevates both the art & science of decision making.  

- dk

Recently we've been talking a lot about how busy we are, connecting IBM Cognos BI and Esri maps and GIS in organizations just starting to realize the benefits of spatial analysis on their BI data. Those benefits can't be overstated, and so our busy schedule just keeps getting busier. It's one of the reasons the blog here has been a little quieter than usual of late.

But I have to share something from an event that happened last week. We'd built a custom demonstration for a very large organization in the US northeast. The actual requirements for this little proof of concept were laid out very clearly, involving spatial analysis of customer data and associated financials together with analytics based on some underlying geographical influencers. We met the stated requirements all squarely and in fact went beyond them in some key areas.

I helped build this little demonstration, but was not present for our actual presentation & demo, which reportedly was very well received. In fact, in a follow up conference call, one of the senior technical IT people from this company described to me his reaction to what he'd seen. After the demo he said to his boss:

"Did we just see what I think we saw?"

He was having a hard time believing that the response we'd put together (in just a couple of days, by the way) was entirely "out of the box", and was wondering just how much custom coding it had required. In fact, that question was the main reason for our follow-up conference call. They wanted to know exactly that: what had we done in terms of custom coding/extensions to meet their requirements.

So you can imagine how great it felt to tell him all about our approach: we had delivered a one hundred percent out-of-the-box, zero-coding solution to all of their stated business requirements. Not one line of code was used to integrate Esri map services into several key dashboards, in some amazingly effective ways.

We're getting used to this kind of reaction.

 - dk

If you haven’t yet, check out Dave’s Trilogy of Observations on the 2011 Esri User Conference (#2, #3).  This was my fourth year attending, and it still astounds me to be surrounded by 15,000 attendees that live and breath GIS.

Here are some quick hitters on things I saw, heard, and discussed:

“Maps are the language”

I’ve heard this message consistently from Esri at the last couple of events.  I’ve heard it said in meetings as well as on UC Main Stage by Mr. Dangermond himself.   What this statement is meant to convey is maps are the medium by which information comes alive.   Spatial presentation of data can impart incredible insight and user impact.  Heck, check out our demos before you disagree.  ;-)

This is also a very interesting statement in the context of the intersection point between BI and GIS systems.  There is an implicit understanding of the value of the “language of maps” in the BI community - largely without knowledge about GIS solutions.  As a result, we have seen significant activity with Cognos BI groups seeking to integrate consumer mapping solutions.

“BI is the route to mainstream”

During the Esri Business Summit, there was a very good panel discussion on the use GIS in business, with representatives from Starbucks, MacKenzie Commercial Real Estate Services LLC, and Edward Jones.  In responding to an audience question about the value and impact of  the GIS capabilities provided to their organizations, the representative from Starbucks stated that they were providing a great service to one group in Starbucks.  Their objective was to have the BI department adopt their work and take it broadly throughout the organization.  I was spinning in my seat looking to see if others had heard the same thing I  had – I’m pretty sure I remember hearing the words, “take GIS mainstream”.  I like that idea a lot!

All in all, another great event.  Thanks Esri!

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