The Twain Shall Meet

With businesses now focusing on the ‘where’ of things, the integration of spatial analysis and BI is helping companies to make more informed decisions, thus leading to better outcomes.

- Shimonti Paul

In today’s highly competitive business scenario, it is imperative to continuously stay updated on technology. Almost every business works hard to achieve success, but what makes one stand out is the understanding which technology to use at what time so as to render maximum gains; gains not only in terms of money, but in terms of driving a change such that numerous lives are benefitted.

Organizations today are collecting data at every level of their business and in volumes that in the past were unimaginable. Datasets are stored in different database systems or in files with distinctive formats, all reflecting business process, application, program software, or information type dependencies.

It is an accepted fact now that about 80% of all data has a spatial component. Traditionally such data would be presented to the user in the form of long reports, either with graphs and pie charts, or in a spreadsheet format. Now, given the complex interrelationships of multidimensional data, integrating spatial data and visualization technology has become ineluctable for offering an accurate, high impact insight to business intelligence users.

Spatial analytics are tools and techniques that employ statistical and quantitative analysis within the context of geography. As Gary Sankary, Global Industry Retail Manager, Esri, USA, points out “Some of the questions that spatial analysis can answer: Where are things located, including people, products, and assets like trucks and stores?  What is the spatial relationship between these things? For example, how close or how far are they from each other? How dense are things like stores or people with a defined area?”