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.
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.
Let's look more closely at how location intelligence can help some of a corporation's critical functions. For marketing and sales, it can help shorten the cycle of finding insights about customers in order to respond to -- and even anticipate -- their demands more efficiently. For managers in the supply chain, LI can not only provide the location of inventory in various stages of manufacturing and distribution but also correlate Internet-based information that could impact its logistics, from weather to natural disasters, to labor union strikes, to security alerts.
Likewise, the ability to identify dynamically the location of customers when they call for service or just for information about their products can help employees who deal with customer relationships resolve their issues quickly -- and earn their loyalty. Finally, for operations management, the ability to correlate the locations of people, products, and customers to key indicators related to those locations can increase the organization's ability to improve operational performance, which ultimately enhances the bottom line.
LI software deployments are growing at a rapid pace as companies seek to provide this critical information to their business and operational managers. But as is the case with any emerging technology, it's not always easy to understand how to deploy it effectively.
For business leaders seeking to gain value from LI, an early challenge is to identify the business activities and processes that will benefit most immediately from it and thus deliver a prompt return on the investment. Ventana Research recommends that organizations identify their information assets, business processes, and customer-facing applications that collect or contain geographic and locational data, as well as those that would benefit from LI enablement, and then explore options offered by technology to improve their efficiency and effectiveness.
Applications and information technology tools now are available to deliver an array of new capabilities in content searching, geographic pinpointing, and providing specific locational context for businesses and consumers. Examples include advances in consumer-mapping portals and location contexts within Web services. Combined with business intelligence software, location intelligence enables companies to analyze data that is useful to many aspects of operations. For example, BI dashboards now may include maps and other locational schemas that help users to visualize information.
Now that BI is a common tool in most corporations, those looking for an edge need to move beyond routine analysis practices to produce valuable new insights -- and location offers a fresh perspective from which to spot them.
Location intelligence can help organizations to find innovation in and make improvement to business processes and financial and operational performance. Ventana Research recommends that organizations determine how they can stay competitive and innovate through leveraging the context of location.