Often business problems can be solved by taking a geographical view. Discovering why deliveries are being delayed to understanding where to locate a new retail store, looking at the problem on a map brings new insights and ideas.
But, spatial business intelligence is only as good as the available data. If your data lack the latest roadworks or new roads you will not be able to spot the pattern behind those late deliveries.
Until recently, data was the single most important limiting factor in developing spatially based business solutions. Often it did not exist, or it was just too expensive to access. The companies who gathered data protected their intellectual property. If you could not afford to buy an entire database, usually at a cost that represented a significant capital investment, you were doomed to stay in the dark.
Fortunately business models have evolved in step with delivery technologies. Data, like almost everything else, is now available as a service.
For those building business solutions, integrating multiple feeds from different spatial data publishers, delivering real business value quickly and cost-effectively. This is completely changing the business case for spatial solutions and is likely to be massive driver of innovation in the next few years.
Two important factors determine spatial business solution success. Firstly, you need to consider the data’s maturity. How easy is it to access and integrate, how reliable is it, how often is the data updated?
Recent experience in the EU has shown us where South Africa could be headed in the next few years. Real-time weather and traffic feeds are widely available at reasonable cost. Whether you are planning a route for a single trip or a complex delivery network, this information once properly integrated into useful applications results in dramatic efficiency improvements.
The second factor to consider is managing multiple supplier’s deliveries. It is likely that no one data publisher will be able to supply all your needs. Instead, systems designers will need to manage relationships with several different organisations at once. Unless you have the capacity to manage this in-house, make sure you choose a partner who already has this network in place and can offer solid guarantees about service quality and uptime. As the client, you should not have to worry about which data is coming from which publisher. The solution should just work.
It is still early days for this kind of solution in South Africa, but we are catching up rapidly. Given the data, we can still design world-beating solutions.
Mike Steyn, Aspire Solutions Director
