The Insider's Guide to Next-Generation BPM
By Kevin Brown, Vice President of Business Development, Tableau Software and Elissa Fink, Vice President of Marketing, Tableau Software , 03/16/2009
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Mapping for analysis and strategy
Look at a map, and you know it's all about location, location, location. Whether for real estate or for retail, location can make it or break it for your business, and leaders need to understand how location plays into performance. Maps help people visualize their environment and orient themselves, thus maps are the best format to visualize geographic data. But until now most businesses could not use maps effectively to orient this kind of business data.
Smart analytics departments continually ask questions about their data -- What? Who? When? Where? How? -- in order to get to the most important question: Why? While companies want to answer questions such as "Where are my products selling the strongest? Where am I losing money? Where is there room for improvement?" in order to uncover the "why," the tools available to help answer the "where" question often limit the flow of answers. Traditionally, maps either have been mere static backdrops to a mess of data or, for the more complicated mapping applications, have required specialists to run them, which then interrupts the analytical flow. There are very few "people-friendly" analytical mapping tools.
The tools available
In the past, companies had to choose whether to enlist a high-end, complex Geographic Information System (GIS) application or resort to simpler, easy-to-use programs that create static, often one-dimensional maps. On the complex end of the spectrum, products from companies like ESRI (Environmental Systems Research Institute) allow companies to dive deep into the mapping data, usually well beyond the immediate needs of the everyday business analyst. Even ESRI's business applications, for instance, offer so much specialized data and data options-street layers, road layers, buffers, centroids, point and polygons, that the programs require dedicated analysts sometimes within a dedicated GIS department to run the program.
MapInfo, while usually considered to be more oriented to business mapping, still requires one or two specialists within a department to do GIS analysis. With these kinds of programs, the business analyst either has to spend significant time learning a new program or has to hand the data off to another person to get a relevant map back, which oftentimes proves to be extremely counterproductive. In many cases, employees won't be able to (and shouldn't have to) stop the line of inquiry to pass their data to trained specialists.
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