Manage your data spatially in the new year

GURGAON, INDIA: The market was abuzz with lots of new technologies and trends last year- SOA, Unified Communication, Green IT, Web 2.0, SaaS, virtualization, mobility, etc. We covered each of these hot trends in detail throughout last year, and will continue doing so this year as well, because they're not going out of fashion anytime soon. But there's one trend that we haven't covered much last year, which is also likely to setup a storm this year. That trend is of using technology for analyzing spatial data, more commonly known as GIS.

Geographic Information System or GIS is not a new concept. It's been there for many years, and has gradually been making inroads into many different industries. But over the recent past, we've seen some very innovative uses of this technology.

Last year, we saw it being used by the power sector, wherein a power distribution company mapped some of its important data on the map of the area it supplied power to. This data included location of customers, transmission lines, and even lamp posts. Using this data, the company was able to manage customer complaints more easily, plan power cuts, and much more.

Two years ago, we saw an insurance company deploying GIS for risk management. It mapped certain demographic data on a city map, such as population density, flood data, number of road accidents in the area, etc. This helped the company in its underwriting process.

Likewise, there can be many other exciting applications of GIS, for just about every industry be it real estate, healthcare, pharma, retail, oil and gas productions, etc. The possibilities are mind-boggling. In fact, the trend now is to develop GIS solutions that integrate with your common business applications. How about mapping your enterprise resource planning (ERP) or customer relationship management (CRM) data to a GIS? For instance, if you're a manufacturing organization with warehouses and manufacturing plants in multiple locations, then you could use GIS to gain some useful insights about them.

For instance, you could determine the warehouse that's closest to a customer, so that you save time and courier costs in shipping orders to the customer. Likewise, you could immediately track inventory information, production status, and much more about each location directly from the map.

GIS could also be used to analyze other types of data. How about calculating region wise sales over the year for your companyto determine why sales have been high or low in different areas. Using GIS with CRM, you could determine where your maximum sales are coming from, and which customers have the maximum complaints.

All the information we talked of could be easily generated from reports, but GIS makes it more convenient. So here's to quicker and easier analysis of data for more informed decisions in the new year.

Happy New Year!