Many in our space have been evangelising the benefits of location within Business Intelligence applications for a long time. To us it seems so obvious, a picture beats a 1000 words, a map beats a 1000 spreadsheet lines. So why is it taking so long for this opportunity/application to take off?
Perhaps we need to step back a bit and question the ability of high volumes of BI users to gain any actionable “Intelligence” from map representations of BI data, unless users have an intuitive understanding of how to read and interpret thematics, heat maps etc they may just see them as interesting rather than essential.
Cost of deployment may have been a problem and complexity of implementation (tying together geocoding, software and data).
The main BI suppliers have all cooperated with the GI players but they have not adopted geo as a killer feature in their product suites (except perhaps Oracle who have been coupling their platform wide spatial capability with their BI tools) which suggests that they haven’t bought the LI story.
If/when LI takes off within the mainstream BI world, what betting Google scoop the pot?
