Enterprise Location Intelligence: Bringing Location-related Business Insight to Support

Solutions for Customer Intelligence, Communications and Care. Enterprise Location Intelligence Bringing Location-related Business Insight to Support Better Decision Making and More Profitable Operations W H I T E PA P E R : ENTERPRISE BUSINESS SOLUTIONS David Loshin • President Knowledge Integrity, Inc. WHITE PAPER: ENTERPRISE BUSINESS SOLUTIONS Enterprise Location Intelligence Bringing Location-related Business Insight to Support Better Decision Making and More Profitable Operations 2 ABSTRACT IT IS NO LONGER A QUESTION AS TO WHETHER LOCATION INTELLIGENCE WILL BE INCORPORATED AS PART OF THE ENTERPRISE INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE, BUT RATHER HOW SOON LOCATION INTELLIGENCE WILL BECOME UBIQUITOUS ACROSS THE APPLICATION ENVIRONMENT. LOCATION INTELLIGENCE BLENDS THE ANALYSIS OF OBJECTS WITH THEIR SPATIAL ATTRIBUTES TO PROVIDE POWERFUL CAPABILITIES THAT CAN BE INTEGRATED WITH BOTH OPERATIONAL AND ANALYTICAL APPLICATIONS FOR MULTIPLE USES THROUGHOUT THE ENTERPRISE. www.pbinsight.com LOCATION INTELLIGENCE CAPABILITIES CAN HELP INCREASE REVENUES, DECREASE COSTS, AND IMPROVE PRODUCTIVITY The Value of Location or railroad station codes, named points of interest, a 3 street intersection, or even analysing text to extract The growing popularity of mapping web sites and place names descriptions. handheld GPS (Global Positioning Satellite) devices is indicative of the continuing recognition of the value of • Reverse Geocoding – Alternatively, the service can location. And even with the growth of online shopping perform the reciprocal operation of reverse geocoding: and virtual commerce, all business transactions and providing the nearest address or point of interest events still take place with the parties located at some given a set of latitude and longitude coordinates. physical location. Clearly, the nature of business • Address Cleansing and Standardisation – parsing and transactions and events is influenced by location as well standardising street, city, and state information allows as the associated demographics of the participating an address cleansing service to match against third- parties. And as commerce transitions to the World party data to ensure that records meet published Wide Web, the corresponding growing volume of data standards for postal addressing. related to the location of events and transactions can be analysed in ways that will contribute business insight • Geographic Data Enrichment – Many of the business among a variety of operational and analytical dimensions, drivers for location intelligence rely on combining including influencing consumer behavior, analysing risk, location information with auxiliary data sets to identifying credible threats, evaluating tax dependencies, enable risk assessment, identification of taxing allocating relief funds, planning strategic military authorities, and standardised representations of deployment, and many other ways of generating positive regional hierarchies (such as place/township/ business value. city/county/state). Matching cleansed addresses against geographically-enriched data sets appends What is Location Intelligence? additional information (such as address corrections, demographic data imports, psychographic data Location intelligence blends the analysis of objects (such imports, and household data) in ways that enable as people, businesses, points of interest, or geographic downstream analysis that will inform business regions) with their spatial attributes (such as average decisions. age, median income, average driving distance, or average educational attainment) to inform decision-making for • Mapping – A mapping service essentially combines the operational efficiencies, revenue growth, or more effective geocoding capability with reporting and visualisation management. These location intelligence capabilities to allow identification and tracking of the locations at can be integrated with both operational and analytical which business transactions occur. A mapping service applications to help increase revenues, decrease costs, relies on geocoding to transform a conceptual location and improve productivity and satisfaction: (address, point of interest, etc.) to its coordinates and then locate where the position of those coordinates on • Geocoding – As the fundamental location intelligence a map, as well as allowing for editing, analysing, and service, geocoding maps a named location (such as an displaying value-added associated data on a map. address) to specific latitude, longitude (and potentially altitude) coordinates on the earth’s surface. Geocoding • Distance – There are different ways of figuring out the service may extend beyond address mapping; given distance between two points, with the most basic a data base of named locations and other points of being the “straight line” (also known as Euclidean) interest, a geocoding service could map any number of distance. However, there are potentially many different places to their location coordinates, including airport types of distance, such as driving distance, driving WHITE PAPER: ENTERPRISE BUSINESS SOLUTIONS Enterprise Location Intelligence Bringing Location-related Business Insight to Support Better Decision Making and More Profitable Operations 4 time, minimal traffic lights, most fuel-efficient, etc. Some examples include: Distance calculations support proximity matching and • Proximity Analysis – Real-time proximity analysis searches for close-by points of interest. builds on geocoding to benefit a variety of business • Routing – Routing leverages geocoding and distance processes, ranging from consumer-directed activities calculations and helps plan the trip among a such as finding closest points of interest (including collection of two or more points. This service looks hotels, restaurants, or entertainment), to expediting at different distance calculations to present the most call routing and providing emergency assistance by efficient paths under specific circumstances, using determining locations for emergency calls, routing different weighting factors such as direct distance, to the proper authorities, and directing roadside driving distance, drive time, number of traffic lights, assistance, police, or emergency medical staff, number of turns, speed limits, and even real-time especially for locations unreachable by standard traffic reports and then present the best route based emergency vehicles. on the user’s specific criteria. • Eligibility and Service Provision – Many service • Proximity Matching – Proximity matching searches for providers and utilities may be limited in providing relevant objects and points of interest within a service based on the proposed service location. There defined radial range. Proximity matching can find may be physical limits that need to be analysed, such relevant points of interest near specified coordinates as a residence’s distance to a central office for DSL or even named locations, and uses a knowledge base internet service, or whether a residential area is served of categorised points of interest (such as “hotels,” by public water and sewage systems or if a service “restaurants,” or “airports”) to provide a list of matches location is served by existing power lines. Location within the closest vicinity. intelligence also contributes to alternate operational processes with geographic dependence. Other Putting Location Intelligence in Place examples include assessing residential properties to forecast investment requirements in utility Business applications typically use geographic data infrastructures or determining which businesses are analysis functionality to pinpoint places on a map or within areas that qualify for government subsidies for presenting directions among a set of locations. But more economic development. and more, location intelligence techniques are used to answer questions regarding spatial relationships that go • Geographic Targeting – Understanding the beyond just putting points or drawing lines on a map.