4 Reasons why you need to implement Location Intelligence in 2012

We’ve been telling everyone – so you might have heard the good news. Yellowfin was announced the Ventana Research 2011 Leadership Award Winner for Location Intelligence (LI), while client Macquarie University was recognized as the Ventana Research 2011 Leadership Award Leader in LI. Yellowfin is the first Australia-based software vendor to win a Ventana Research Leadership Award. Macquarie University is also the first Australia-based university to take home a Ventana Research Leadership Award.

The awards recognized the Yellowfin and Macquarie University Business Intelligence (BI) implementation as the best 2010/11 worldwide example of LI and the most likely to produce significant business value heading into 2012. So, naturally, we’re pretty pumped.

Now, think you’d be sweating like an underprepared college layabout during exam time if asked how to define LI? It’s ok, you can uncurl from the foetal position, it’s simple – just combine BI and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). For more detail, check out our feature page, Defining Location Intelligence blog, or download our LI white paper. But don’t be fooled by the simplicity of the concept – LI can deliver stunning business value. Need convincing? Discover some of the applications and benefits for yourself – The Benefits of Location Intelligence: You’re in real estate, didn’t you know?

But why would you just take our word for it – that LI can successfully align corporate strategy and expose unknown relationships between different business operations? Let’s take a look at what the independent industry experts have to say:

• Ventana Research: “The evolution of information technology has matured rapidly to support the use of ‘location intelligence’ for making effective business decisions. When combined with embedded automated decision applications, location intelligence can lead to the execution of precise customer decision strategies and a new level of enterprise performance.”
• Ovum: “Many are now looking to capitalise on location data in their BI to better leverage the where in operational and strategic decision making. LI can make BI sizzle.”
• Gartner: “By linking location to corporate information, organisations can use location intelligence to make better decisions, enhance planning capabilities, and achieve real business benefits.”

So, why should 2012 be the year that you consider LI for your customers or business? The volatile economic landscapes of many developed nations have heightened the need for organizational transparency – to help tighten belts where applicable, identify areas of inefficiency or opportunity and firmly align strategy with action. With this current climate in mind, here are some reasons to invest in a BI solution with a wholly-integrated LI module:

• LI makes BI more accessible to business users. By enabling users to visualize the relationship between corporate data and location, analysis and understanding is much easier to conduct and derive. And, as Gartner has suggested in its 2011 and 2012 BI Magic Quadrant surveys, business users are controlling larger amounts of BI’s overall usership. Further, they’re playing a more domineering roll in the purchase decision, meaning that ease-of-use is now the number one criteria to consider when purchasing a BI product. Studies from the TDWI and BeyeNetwork have also demonstrated the link between pervasive BI and superior Return on Investment (ROI) for BI initiatives. The presentation – How Pervasive BI is Good for Your Business and How to Get There – by Director of TDWI Research, Wayne Eckerson, states that the number of active users is one of the best performance indicators for any BI implementation. The presentation concludes by suggesting that BI adoption and usage rates remain low because most BI products are still geared towards analysts and power users. It’s now utterly undeniable – the consumerization of BI, the widespread deployments and high levels of user adoption that follow, have considerable positive business impacts. BI projects and technology that target the report consumer – is “good for your business”. The BeyeNetwork’s research report, Ease of Use and Interface Appeal in Business Intelligence Tools, also directly links BI adoption to ease-of-use and BI ROI.
• The ability to understand the “where” of corporate data – not just that “what”, “how”, “when” and “why” – enables the ultra effective marketing of products and services. For example, if the marketing team for a large shopping complex is able to map the distribution of customers, they can establish patterns and clusters to develop highly targeted mail campaigns based on area codes.
• Applying LI to logistical data enables organizations to unite customers, suppliers, infrastructure, projects and products to ensure the most effective use of resources. For more, check out our blog, Location Intelligence for Mining and Exploration.
• ‘Big Data’ has received a large – no pun intended – amount of attention over the last 18 months. The emergence of more effective tools and techniques to capture, collate and analyse bourgeoning data assets has seen many organizations move to extract more detail from, and leverage larger amounts of, their data than ever before. Data volumes are expanding too, with the ability to capture more – and more detailed – operational and transactional data, along with the surfacing of new data types – social media anyone? It’s widely acknowledged that between 70 and 80 percent of business data has a location element. In fact, according to IDC and Business Week Research, more than 80 percent of organizational data has a location component. Therefore, the more data organizations capture, the more important identifying the “where” will become.

Imagine being able to see how different aspects of your business interact and interrelate. With Yellowfin, you can. Yellowfin: Making Location Intelligence easy.