Customer Relationship Management (CRM): The use of spatial analysis for demographic segmentation and market analysis first brought GIS to the general business community.
More Intranet and external Internet resources become directly accessible. Increased use of OGC standards in the location intelligence marketplace and within the business enterprise can provide technology users with a basis for improved decision making and greater product choice. Much less expertise is now required to use geospatial information for business tasks (See Figure 1).įigure published in Imaging Notes, Fall 2008 - įigure 1 - Beyond Traditional GIS/Imagery and Mass Markets With the advent of the Web, and partly due to OGC standards, geospatial data has become an enabler for many mass-market applications, such as Web mapping and location based services (LBS).
Traditional geographic information systems (GIS) and image processing software products provide powerful techniques for dealing with geospatial data in geospatial-centric applications, but geospatial data and processing are no longer confined to those products. Common functions of business intelligence technologies are reporting, dashboards, scoreboards, online analytical processing (OLAP), data mining, process mining, business performance management analytics and predictive analytics.
Business intelligence (BI) refers to computer-based techniques used for identifying, extracting and analyzing business data, such as sales revenue by products and/or departments, or by associated costs and revenues. Business intelligence supports better business decision making leading to new revenue opportunities, improved cost visibility, and better risk management. GeoBI is business intelligence that makes use of geospatial information. The OGC is the organization that can turn GeoBI user requirements into standards that BI vendors implement to take advantage of the rapidly growing ecosystem of interoperable Web-based spatial data and services. Business intelligence platforms and applications need to help users find, use and communicate location information, so it follows that digital standards for system-to-system communication of geospatial information are a critical enabling factor for better business intelligence. Geographic location is usually a critical factor in business research and calculations about customers, suppliers, distributors, natural resources, transportation hubs, energy and most other things.