What Does Location Intelligence Really Mean?

HBO’s Game of Thrones is an American fantasy television drama series and an adaptation of ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ — George R. R. Martin’s series of fantasy novels. The show has invented languages, histories, and location based plot galores. Elastic, a renowned design studio created a three dimensional map based title sequence to set the stage for the audience. As the story unfolds, the 3D map evolves to give a fair view of where the action is happening and how everything fits together. All this, just to make that connect with the audience!

Maps in real life are no different. Since time immemorial, location has been a crucial element to demystify spatial analysis — tell stories, and offer rich contexts and insights about a place, events, people and now businesses!

Exactly What is Location Intelligence?

Location Intelligence is a process which involves deriving insights from geospatial data to solve particular problems across various industries. It is primarily built on geographical information system (GIS) tools to provide analytical and operational solutions for businesses. The Location intelligence helps businesses and government organizations to analyze various situations and complexities, thereby providing solutions to a particular business problem.

Location Intelligence is an integration of location data along with your business intelligence. It helps businesses to analyze the clients or customers in a better way in terms of who they are, what they do, what is their consumer behaviour and much more. This all data insights then can be used to uncover new business opportunities, understand the latest trends, improve consumer experience and make strategic decisions more effectively.

What is a Location Intelligence Software?

A Location Intelligence software is primarily built for organizations to collect and compile big data, analyze it, filter it and generate real time maps. The LI software are business intelligence solutions that are used by data scientists and LI analysts to see trends on maps to optimize several business opportunities.

To understand one scenario related to the usage of location intelligence tools, data scientists can use the platform to analyse consumer behavior for a particular area and decide whether a new branch of a boutique shop should be opened or not.

Maps Matter…

Today, every place we go to is geo-encoded. Visual Insights into this geo-coded data has torched the way into a goldmine of opportunities like establishing patterns and predicting behavior. Moreover, it is now resolving complex problems that only geographical data can reveal.

Mobile phones have become an irreplaceable part of our lives — personal and professional. We trust location intelligence on choosing where to eat, checking weather conditions, planning route to travel from point A to point B, and much more.

So, for key business executives knowing where the action is, is absolutely fundamental. Our increasing reliance on geospatial technologies such as maps and other location based apps has paved a path for organizations to develop location-enabled apps. And these organizations could be a Fortune 500, a startup in Silicon Valley or even a local cafe.

Foursquare — a search-and-discovery mobile app known for gamification and check-ins is a location data powerhouse trusted by major brands all over the world. Accurately connecting customers’ digital activities with their real-world life generates significant data for marketers to reach out to the right audience just when they should!

Power of maps coupled with geographically referenced data has been helping businesses unravel the relationship of location between people, events, transactions, facilities, and assets. Application of geo-location software in the business scenario is a trend on the rise.

Story so far…

There have been five distinct phases in the development of Geographic Information Systems. Phase one was mostly about hand-drawn geographical illustrations through paper maps. One of the earliest, most successful use case of Geographic Information System (GIS) was recorded in 1854, when John Snow, an English physician and a leader in medical hygiene, determined the source of cholera outbreak in London through mapping mechanism. He marked points on a map depicting where the cholera victims lived, and while connecting the cluster he found a nearby malignant water source. His findings drove a significant improvement in general public health around the world.

Shaping the direction of future research and development, the second phase saw the adoption of digital technologies by organizations that led to a focus on the development of best practice. Phase three, saw the development and putting GIS systems to use in the commercial marketplace by tracking real time traffic. While the final phases are now all about billions of connected devices and machine learning as an advancement to focus on improving the usability of technology by making facilities more user centric.

In the current times, when businesses are seen struggling with petabytes of big data everyday, length and breadth of sophisticated location intelligence technologies emerges as an enabler, with the taming power to bring structure and order to the data.

The location intelligence platform plays along with location data stored digitally in a database and facilitates businesses to look for optimum locations to find their target audience, arrive at informed business decisions, drive competitive advantage, track their field assets, understand customer’s choices and precisely bring to them what they have been looking for, and so much more.

The core functions performed over location data include geo-encoding, analyzing, and visualizing data.

Geo-encoding is basically coming up with latitude and longitude of a location. Encoding gives crucial information via data sets about the attributes of the location, important points of interest such as airport, shopping malls, etc. located around, population density in the area, location demographics, age of properties situated in that location, residential and commercial property usage, etc.

Location data analytics reveal the relationship of a location with it’s proximity and associated business factors. For example, number of servicing jobs completed by a field service agent, or restaurants located in a particular area, etc.

Visualization happens through presenting data typically via maps. Coupled with a layer of BI, the visualization can give deeper insights into critical business data such as which could be strongest areas for generating sales, or which areas could be more ready for targeting specific advertising campaigns, tracking and planning field force in real time, etc.

What we presented to you in this blog is a quick highlight of how location data and location intelligence evolved over the years. In terms of applications to business scenarios, location intelligence helps you answer some questions such as:

• Where is the real action happening? Where are my target customers?
• Which areas can you aggressively market to?
• What could be the best location for your next office, store or branch?
• How to position your brand to let your customers and prospects easily locate you?
• How can you leverage location data to make intelligent decisions?
• How do you get a more timely and accurate view of your on-field workforce?
• How do you track, locate, and obtain real time insights into their on-the-field job status?

I hope that the above information is helpful to get a glimpse of Location Intelligence and its applications in the real world to solve business problems.