Your SpotOn the IBM Cognos Edge

Two hundred or so years ago, somewhat before the dawn of modern Business Intelligence and GIS, New York City was mapped out. This historic event was well chronicled in a recent New York Times article.

That map changed the way people looked at New York City, as well as the way the city operated. The map drove transportation, city planning, development, order, taxation, and more. And while not everyone agrees on the positive versus negative effects imposed by NYC's map, there's no denying it laid the foundation for ongoing development.

It's a great analogy for us. It confirms what our customers tell us. Maps do for businesses what that grid did for New York City. Maps segment data to be more consumable, more helpful, allowing everyone who uses them to make better business decisions.

The article cites historians as declaring NYC's historical map “the single most important document in New York City’s development".

The same can be true for maps in the context of BI when applied to a decision-making process. The following story, told to me recently by a colleague, illustrates the potential benefits pretty clearly:

A CEO at a manufacturing company was being pitched a proposed prototype mapping solution to better manage his company's production operations. As the solution was being shown, the CEO became visibly upset, but not with the proposed solution. The map showed quite clearly that two of the company's plants were operating at less than 50% capacity. This was not entirely unusual, and would not have been such a big deal, had the two plants not been separated by less than 30 miles. Turns out they were in two different US states, and the close proximity only became immediately obvious once the data was shown on a map.

The CEO looked around the room and asked his collected production managers (somewhat loudly and aggressively I was told) why nobody had thought it might be a good idea to consolidate operations in one of the two semi-idle plants. The response was (unfortunately for the responder): "...they're in different states..."

The meeting ended with the CEO approving the purchase of the mapping solution on the spot, directing his management team to figure out which plant they were closing, and to have it all well in motion before the end of the week.

We love hearing stories of how a spatial lens on business data has helped drive business performance within a company (or a city, or a state, or a government department, or wherever). We hear these stories almost every day.

Tell us your story.