When spatial data and Business data meet up in an integrated platform, Business apps gain consumer-app functionality, like heat maps, bubble charts, and location-based data that we all know and love.
In “The Chronicles of Narnia,” the Pevensie children walk through a wardrobe and find themselves in a magical land where a lion rules and animals speak. Literature is full of similar wormholes that liberate characters from their everyday lives and send them into places of wonder. Strangely enough, our employees have a parallel experience every day when they arrive at work, but not in a good way.
Once employees walk into the office, Google searches don’t bring up the exact fact they know is hidden in a business doc. Locating an infant incubator or a pneumatic drill that they need to care for a patient or finish a construction job is harder than finding a car share. What is most sorely missed is simple mapping tools.
Think about how often we depend on mapping apps every day. Even using a rough, conservative estimate, location-based tools save smart phone users more than 72 billion hours a year, and that’s based loosely on every smart phone owner saving merely one hour a day when they search for a restaurant or gas station nearby, get turn-by-turn directions from Google or Apple maps, or review the fastest route home based on current traffic congestion.
Bringing geospatial data into the business and presenting it on dynamic maps in real time across many devices promises to save untold numbers of hours for employees. These innovative business apps shrink the chasm between the technologies we depend on outside the workplace and those inside our office doors.
In the business world, geospatial, geolocation, or geographic information systems (GIS) apps solve business problems just as they do in our personal lives. The apps are built on digital platforms that merge enterprise business data with GIS so that when employees ask where, when, and how, they get answers. Why are they finally entering the business world? Because new technology collects spatial data from multiple sources and stores it with business data within a single integrated platform—instead of it being in separate platforms. And if that single platform leverages in-memory for advanced data processing, then organizations can reduce overall costs while speeding response times.
Proving that a picture is worth a thousand words, in-memory data management platforms can turn complex data into meaningful 2D and 3D maps and graphs that convey valuable information at a glance. Businesses can use the insight from these tools to act quickly and intelligently to provide higher business value.
In manufacturing, for example, a map shows everyone in the supply chain where materials are located anywhere in the world. The distributor can pinpoint a high-volume hotspot in Oakland, Calif., where 100,000 pairs of jeans are on a shipping container waiting to be unloaded at the port. The same holds true in transportation. A national rental car agency can track every vehicle in its fleet and view a timeline that forecasts which rental cars need maintenance and when. At a global theater company, an overlay of the performance venue will show exactly where all the props and costumes are for a 200-person production that travels the world. Businesses are just getting started building geospatial apps, and they are showing incredible imagination and real value.
City governments and agencies are especially interested in combining geospatial information with their city data, and it is affecting the quality of resident lives, at times even saving lives. The city of Buenos Aires, for example, recorded 101 deaths from flooding in 2013. City planners realized they could prevent water from rising and overflowing if they kept the storm drains working properly.
