Burning Issue

This month's hot topic:

Lack of Location Awareness is ‘Analytical Blind Spot’ for Organisations.

Traditional Business Intelligence has looked at the ‘who’, ‘what’, and ‘why’ around data, but has ignored the ‘where’. Location is a core analytical dimension. Within this data lies a vast pool of intelligence that largely remains untapped for organisations. This rich data source is particularly important for UK Public Sector organisations in enabling a single view of the citizen, delivering citizen self-services, improving compliance, and optimising cost efficiencies.

Location is ubiquitous and influences most, if not all, business behaviour and outcomes – yet a lack of location awareness remains an analytical blind spot for a large number of organisations who have not considered how the geographic and location aspects of the data they hold affects their business processes or decision making. While consumer applications such as Bing and Google maps have bred a demand for, and familiarity with, the ability to manipulate spatial data to answer routine queries, the potential to apply the same principles across the enterprise isn’t being capitalised upon to its fullest effect.

According to Ovum, 80% of enterprise data contains geospatial co-ordinates that can be visualised on a map as points, lines, or areas. However, this location component of data is being disregarded by many organisations and IT systems. Traditional business intelligence systems have looked at the ‘who’, ‘what’, and ‘why’ around data, but have ignored the ‘where’. Within this data lies a vast pool of intelligence that remains largely untapped by organisations.

Driven by challenges such as shifting population patterns, increasing immigration, CO2 reduction targets, requests for planning permission, plus terrorist and security threats, the public sector is perhaps the most advanced in recognising the value of exploiting this rich data source to deliver real insight and operational value. However, the widespread adoption of location aware technologies across the UK public sector still has much more to offer in terms of enabling a single view of the citizen, delivering citizen self-services, improving compliance and optimising cost efficiencies.

Historically, location-centric technology has been considered a niche concern, used only by members of the GIS department and requiring specialist knowledge to realise business benefits from its use. However, things have moved on and we are now far beyond the days of basic mapping tools. The proliferation of location-enabled mobile devices, in tandem with the growing adoption of GPS and RFID, has made it far easier to identify the location of people and assets. As a result, user-friendly technologies with a location component can now add value to or make life easier for employees in almost any job role.

By opening up and making user-friendly location aware technology available to frontline staff instead of considering it to be the sole domain of specialist GIS teams, companies and organisations can improve and accelerate business efficiency and performance, particularly in customer-centric processes. For instance, a location aware solution unlocks the unprecedented possibility for an organisation to visually identify its most valuable customers, better assess risk scenarios, reveal the most profitable location for a new store, assess how demographics correlate with specific objectives or revenue goals and target individuals with similar demographics to profitable existing customers.

Location Aware CRM systems represent the key that can unlock the value of existing data assets across the organisation as a whole, offering a way for institutions to gain maximum value from their data, and to deliver more for less under tight budget constraints. With an ever increasing volume of business data for organisations to access, location aware CRM solutions enable organisations to access spatial data, cleanse and validate the underlying data, integrate and enrich it with internal systems and processes, analyse and visualise it as needed and then to communicate the results both internally and externally with selected customers or citizens. In fact, they extend across the whole CRM application ecosystem of targeting, acquiring, retaining, understanding and collaborating with customers or citizens to the mutual benefit of all parties.

As Location Aware CRM solutions enable organisations to analyse vast amounts of multi-dimensional data for greater business insight and better decision making, this will lead to improved competitiveness and better business performance. We believe that Location Aware CRM is set to break into mainstream business computing over the next two to five years as more and more organisations become alert to the significant amount of data intelligence available to them that they have so far been unable or unwilling to exploit.

Responses to www.pbinsight.co.uk

Mark Bishop
Product Marketing Manager EMEA, Pitney Bowes Business Insight