All Business Is Local

The rapid pace and global breadth of commerce continues to force businesses to respond quickly to new opportunities, changing customer demands, and the emergence of market-differentiating processes and technologies. Often, the competitor that responds fastest and most appropriately wins the contest for customers.

In this environment, organizations constantly look for a competitive edge, and often this appears in the form of information. An emerging source of such an edge is location intelligence (LI), which incorporates geographic and location information into business processes. This added context can help companies to make better decisions, take more effective actions, and improve their performance overall.

The Role of LI

Every element of business has location and geographic contexts. LI is relevant to logistics, supply chain management, customer acquisition and retention efforts, and many financial and operational decisions, especially those concerning where to place retail outlets, business assets, and even people. For example, making the sales organization or retail locations more competitive requires intelligent use of location information, as does influencing customers through advertising or direct mail. Answering the "where" questions -- Where are my most profitable customers? Where are my competitors located and advertising? Where are my retail locations performing best? -- is a fundamental need.

Technologically, LI combines aspects of business intelligence (BI) software and geographic information systems. It collects and integrates location and geographic data from many key information systems and sources: databases; enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and supply chain management (SCM) software; and the Internet and Web sites, among others. When that data is gathered into an LI application, business users can analyze it to gain insights and make decisions that are more effective because they take into account locational factors.

Location intelligence can help businesses innovate by understanding the locational contexts of their customers and how the positioning of competitors influences them. Consumers need access to locational information for product research and shopping, and businesses can gain insights from knowing the locations of their own assets and those of competitors. For example, an obvious way for organizations to increase their marketing of brands, products, and services is to influence consumers to buy at retail locations. Offering them locational context through consumer portals or Web access in mobile devices can reduce the challenges consumers face in acquiring knowledge about products and where and from whom to buy them.