So I conducted a Webinar mid-last-week, the first installment of our GBI-1 Webinar Series, about the powerful combination of Esri Map Server shapes with IBM Cognos BI reports.
Not to recap the whole thing (the posted webinar recording is here), I proposed in the session that when it comes to getting started with geospatial business intelligence, incorporating maps thematically shaded regions into IBM Cognos BI reports is the most logical place to start, because:
- every BI user knows that their application has a "region" dimension somewhere (region being one of two immutable dimensions)
- customer data records (or data records for constituents, or partners, or sales outlets, or... well, you get the picture...) may not have latitude and longitude information, but they do include attributes like ZIP, State, County, Area Code, and so on that are just begging to be joined to map layers for analysis.
The demonstration I presented in the Webinar provided a great opportunity to show off the cool new features I want to talk about. One of the main new features enables Vantage Maps users to query data in specific map service layers, and then apply results from that query directly as input to the BI data in the report.
I can almost hear everyone out there say: "Huh? What the heck does that mean?"
It means that custom shapes and points rendered in map service layers (containing valuable "geodata", like weather forecast information, elevation data, ecological data, demographics, and so much more...) can be queried simply and easily, with the results of that query subsequently fed into to a BI data query to update a report.
Still not crystal clear? How about an example:
- the US Geological Survey publishes a map service that includes hazards of various types (hurricanes, wild fires, earthquakes, floods, and so on). Thinking about the recent wildfires in Texas, with our new capability, I can now answer the question: How many insured customers do we have in a 50 mile radius of all wild fires bigger than 1500 acres, in Texas? The answer looks like this:
The same kinds of truly spatial queries, for spatial attributes and events like extreme weather, earthquakes, elevation, and so on can easily be tied directly to IBM Cognos BI queries and associated report objects.
For business, the possibilities are virtually limitless. Imagine being a marketing analyst, and being able to query a map to isolate neighborhoods where the average age is in a specific range, the average household income is in your target prospect sweet spot, and conduct a surgically targeted marketing campaign to just the right people.
These are only a couple of the great new features in SpotOn Vantage Maps. You can see more if you sign up for our GBI-1 Webinar series, next on-air this coming Thursday, the 22nd of September.
- dk