GIS and BI: From Anecdotes to Facts
Posted by Dave Kerr on Tue, Apr 26, 2011
What’s the real value of combining business intelligence (BI) and geospatial information services (GIS)?
The vast majority of customers who come to us already know the answer (and that’s why they come knocking on the door), but for those who don’t know the answer we start having that ever-popular ROI discussion (return on investment).
Our ROI discussions are not strictly about the value of BI reports. Nor are they just about the value of maps.
The discussions are about getting users to actually use the reports and maps that are given to them. The result, and inherent ROI, is increased user adoption of all that expensive technology. Oh yeah, and the users make better business decisions too.
How much better are their business decisions?
The New York Times recently reported that researchers are finally quantifying how much better data driven decisions are.
The end figure is 5 to 6%. Those who use data to make decisions increase output and productivity by 5 to 6%. In an organization with only 500 people using BI effectively, this could add up to somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 business days worth of additional bandwidth and productivity... every single working day.
Imagine the potential results if business users could actually use the full range of software tools effectively.