InetSoft BI Webcast: The Case for Combining Geographic Information and Business Intelligence

This is a continuation of the transcript of a Webinar hosted by InetSoft entitled "Geographic Business Intelligence." The speaker is Mark Flaherty, CMO at InetSoft.

Mark Flaherty (MF): What is really missing from point GIS solutions is the business intelligence. And what is missing from many business intelligence solutions is the location intelligence. Bringing these two systems together is the first step in maximizing investment in either technology. What is interesting is that it might actually be the case that the pubic sector maybe ahead of private enterprises in this case. It seems the public sector recognizes the importance of geographic information, and a lot of these organizations do have BI software, too. So the building blocks are there. And now with our own recent product release we’ve brought these two systems together.

GIS and BI each brings a complementary approach to the other. The geographic approach to business intelligence enables geography to be a new means of organizing data. Location can relate disparate data in ways other traditional techniques have difficulty doing. Similarly business intelligence brings an industrial strength reporting environment to GIS. So those are the conceptual reasons why it’s a good idea to mash up these two technologies, if you will.

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What are some of the business drivers for this integration? First of all, one of the key arguments, as I’ve already hinted at, is that it maximizes the return on investment, the ROI, of the software licensing for the necessary technology. In our case, now just one application need be acquired. If we bring GI and BI together, you get the functionality of each. So using them together results in a combined functionality that is greater than the sum of the parts. A third driver is avoiding inconsistency in reports that could arise if you purchased a point geographic information system and ran it along side some other BI application. With the unified solution like ours, you get one single view of organizational information. Lastly, quite simply, the unified system approach is going to yield lower administrative and operating costs.