Do Only GIS Folk Understand the Term Location Intelligence?

I asked Joe this question just the other day” “If I said location intelligence to you what would i be talking about?”.

Joe has an MBA and has been in sales all his life. New to GIS, Joe responded “No idea, I’m thinking it has something to do with business intelligence maybe”. Joe’s response to me brought home a nagging doubt i have had about our “new” GIS terminology: terms like ‘location intelligence’ and ‘location analytics’ only mean something to GIS folk.

We’ve spoken before many times in this blog about our GIS vernacular. That we need to speak in terms understood by a wider audience. Buffering, spatial joins etc are just not gonna cut it. Finally I am hearing more voices in our community talking about focusing on the problem, and avoiding talk about the technology.

That’s a huge step forward.

But I fear in trying to widen our message, we have come up with new terminology which is just as confusing. The business community in particular know business terminology. It will be an uphill struggle to teach this new business GIS vernacular. We need to wrap what we say in their language. Location intelligence (LI) is truly simply another arm of business intelligence (BI). It is actually the missing arm of BI.

I had an interesting conversation last week. A friend mentioned that his GIS product was competing with Tableau, I did a double take. GIS competing with a BI platform? But its true. LI truly sits under BI. Its another tool to answer business questions. We’ve mentioned before that we think there will be more MapBox-Tableau type relationships emerging. It makes sense.

Location strategy is truly a part of an overall business strategy, LI needs to be wrapped within BI.

What do you think?

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Tags: business intelligence, location analytics, location intelligence

Categories: ArcGIS Online, cloud GIS, Mobile ArcGIS, Mobile GIS, Web and mobile GIS

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 19th, 2016 at 5:59 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.