Your SpotOn the IBM Cognos Edge

We keep getting into these BI-GIS conversations, and it is sometime hard to know if we are acting as a "GBI translator", or just annoying people.  I suspect it's quite often the latter, but at least people remember us, right..?

A while back we were kindly asked to participate in a Proof of Technology session with a large insurance company.  Our topic was the technical integration of Cognos BI and Esri ArqGIS.  I kicked off the discussion with the suggestion that upon presentation of their geospatial reporting requirements, the BI vendor would propose a company dashboard targeted to 10,000 users that happened to include a map.  The GIS perspective would be an insanely rich and powerful location-based risk analysis application that would could be leveraged by a handful of GIS  analysts.

Two radically different solutions from the same set of requirements, and the right answer is likely between the two.  This got head nods and chuckles from the client, fairly  muted responses from the other vendors.

The crux of the issue is the hammer and nail analogy, your going to see the world through the perspective and strength of your solution. If you boil both BI and GIS solutions down to their essence, they are both simply information systems presenting business insight to users. 

Time to add the handsaw to the toolbox and start giving organizations the information they want and need.

PS; we haven't been invited back to another Proof of Technology since…