July 8, 2008
BI - Closing Starbucks??
What news! Closing 600 stores must hurt. Makes me think about which ones? and the article in the Seattle paper kind of probes this sentiment...
My point is only this: geographic context - the foundation of location intelligence - is not static. Losing site of the changes not only in 'store sales' but in the demographic and competitive environment in which the store functions, will reward you with failure. Yes, Failure.
BI is the specialization of information to pay attention to your sales... Location Intelligence is the capacity to see the rest of the story - the geographic context of competition and demographics (and yes, sales) and all change all the time. Geo-analytics and geo-visualization are a rising wave - catch it before the competition does and drives you to failure...
Posted by John D. Corbett at 1:30 PM | Comments (0)
May 13, 2008
Location Location Location
We've all heard that mantra about real-estate - but would believe 'location' was the common thread when 20 MIT students were let loose with Google's upcoming Android operating system. Read about it here - only 1 student team did not use location in their creative application of business use of a cell phone (yes, all teams had to have a correspondingly believable business plan).
Location intelligence is more than 'where you are' - but such "presence" information is acutely valuable.
Location to a business is also valuable - and the signal is already embedded in your POS data.
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Posted by John D. Corbett at 2:45 PM | Comments (0)
May 1, 2008
New term: Bashup (BI data and a map...)
Check out the TechTarget entry for yesterday from Mark Whitehorn.
Location intelligence and BI - the decision driving interpretability of BI data on a map = success.
Mark writes that "BI is about turning data into information" and he correctly points out that simply putting data on a map accomplishes this. But there is more!
Location intelligence is more than simply mapping BI data. Location intelligence includes 'geo-analytics' - starting from the simple: show me the stores with sales > x AND which are within 5 miles of competitor A. To complex: cluster analysis on sales by SKU and including weighting by both market demographics and competition.
Geo-analytics introduce a whole new opportunity to extract truly decision driving information from your data - but simply mapping your data on Virtual Earth or Google Earth is a great first step.
A 'Bashup' - hmm, not sold on the term but what a powerful competitive advantage!
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Posted by John D. Corbett at 11:45 AM | Comments (0)
