Talking BI to the GIS Crowd
Posted by Chris Ovens on Tue, Oct 13, 2009
What to say when the audience knows more than you...
Over the last couple of months, I've had the pleasure of being asked to speak several times to GIS experts on the topic of "why" and "how" they should care about business intelligence. Once again last week, I had the opportunity to stand on my soap box and talk about GBI - Geographic Business Intelligence. This time it was at the ESRI Canada Regional User Conference in Toronto.
As forewarned, the audience had very little exposure and experience with business intelligence. What's a BI guy like me doing in a place like this - and what the heck can I give of value to these GIS brainiacs? "Hello rock, I'm standing here beside the hard place..."
Here what the good folks got; the top reasons why the GIS department should care about BI:
- The CIO's top technology priory is BI. This has been the case again this year, and it has been for the better part of a decade. So says Gartner. GIS can gain CIO mind share by just being a part of the reporting and analytics infrastructure.
- BI has broad based access to the critical business data; data that may not readily be available to the GIS analysts. Much of the BI data modeling may already be in place, after years of benefiting from being a CIO priority.
- BI handles complex data manipulation. There are business problems that are clearly best handled by the BI query(ies). BI was designed to do complex calculations, support report parameters, and deliver rich end-user prompting. BI can crunch the numbers - spatial analysis makes the numbers stunning.
- BI data is secured. When BI report data is used in map layer development, the BI security model is persisted through use in the map.
- Enterprise BI is built to disseminate information - to whomever, wherever, in the organization. Web-based enterprise mapping can benefit from this delivery infrastructure immensely. Rather than the "build it and they will come" mentality; maps can hop on the BI "bus", it's going where they need to be!
The audience seemed receptive, and in some cases downright eager. Or they were just too damn polite. Canadians...
Let me know what you think. What did I miss?
Chris