GIS cruises through business lanes
Bal Krishna and Pia
CSDMS
bal.krishna@gisdev.net
Use of information is the key to any
organisation today. Significance of GIS in data management and decision making is
enormous. This technology holds tremendous potential for improving productivity,
credibility and profitability of any organisation. The horizontal spread of GIS includes
such target marketing customer service, demand forecasting, property management/real
estate market share analysis, merchandise planning, distribution logistics and many more
areas. GIS can be customised to meet the use specific requirements..
Business GIS is a concept by which
corporations begin to use spatial information to manage their business. Since 70-80% of
any data has geographical location, it becomes important to use GIS for analysing them
spatially. The corporate investment in spatial data would yield as efficient siting of new
customer base, cutting the cost of finding new retail or distribution centres, realigning
sales territories to utilise the sales force more efficiently, monitoring the profit and
loss of each retail node, for example. The GIS ability to quickly interpret large
quantities of data and visualising the proximity of spatial attributes to each other is
being used for modeling future business trends.
ITo compete in the complex business environment, companies are reassessing their approach
towards markets. This relatively new focus towards analysis at the local level implies a
decentralised management empowered to act at a micro level. Firms are now relying on
flexibility and adaptation to differentiated consumer demands.
A GIS makes use of geographic and attribute data by
integrating the two in powerful manner. Attribute data are represented by populations,
income levels, competition, sales, etc. while geographic data is represented as points,
lines and polygons representing important places, roads and landuse respectively. GIS
provides the ability to query this spatial data along with its non-spatial properties. For
example, if one wants to know how many people are using washing machine in a city and that
too represented in spatial manner and further classified into categories (depending upon
distribution density), we have zones where the penetration is most or else where the
potential for the white good is high .
Why GIS?
Usefulness of GIS in corporate sector can be achieved if this technology is integrated
into the business planning process. This will not only contribute to the overall business
but will also reflect on its mission as well as its profits.
The central concerns of corporate sector users of GIS are now beginning
to turn towards the business needs of the organisations. The corporate data sets are now
being seen as valuable resources for strategic planning. Bringing potentially large data
sets into manageable contexts so that they provide value to an organisation is an
important quality of GIS. GIS brings out the ever increasing complexities of information
in an easy to analyse visual representation. The obvious goal of GIS is to improve
profitability.
Strategic planning for private organisations requires information,
since it is information that provides the context for management decision-making. Turning
data into useful information is largely accomplished by adding meaning to this data, while
meaning depends upon the context and decision for which the data is required. A GIS must
help attributes, add meaning to data, and hence provide information for making a decision.
GIS differs from other information systems, as the underlying technology is based on
geographic and cartographic principles, which if foreign to many end users. It is
important to understand the processes involved in implementing the technology within the
organisations, and the ways in which the output is being used for decision making.
As understanding needs to be developed of where GIS should be used and
how it should be applied to solve business problems. GIS is likely to have a significant
impact on the structure and operations of organisations implementing them.