GIS technical Why GIS is a tool for enterprise information management

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1 Why GIS is a tool for enterprise information management by Ana Moreira, Edge Evolve A typical information strategy aims to build an information foundation that is integrated and actionable in order to equip business with the right information to support its decision-making. GIS technology is a powerful tool, which can be used to assist enterprise information managers to deliver a quality information strategy. Interrelationships, specifically those based on geographic data, that might otherwise be difficult to describe or explain, are often readily understood when visually presented. Typically business intelligence (BI) initiatives handle the who, what and when exceptionally well however the where is vastly underexploited and may in fact, be completely missing. Spatial data, the where of BI, does two things: Firstly, it enhances the who by binding third party data from companies such as MapIT and AfriGIS to your existing data to enhance and to improve the quality of your tabular information. Secondly, it enables analysis for the where. Integrating spatial data and visualisation technology delivers accurate, high impact information content. What is enterprise information management? A wiki definition: Enterprise information management is the name for the field that combines business intelligence (BI) and enterprise content management (ECM)... It approaches the management of information from the perspective of enterprise information strategy, based on the needs of information workers Enterprise information management is neither a single technology, a component of architecture, a system nor a project rather it is a coordinated framework of disciplines for managing data and information assets throughout an organisation. Fig. 1: Data to information to knowledge metamorphosis. In order to produce effective and trustworthy information the underlying data needs to be given structure, relevance, definition and a timeframe (see Fig. 1). This implies that the underlying data needs to be managed effectively. The definition provided in the DAMA Data Management Body of Knowledge (DAMA-DMBOK) is: "Data management is the development, execution and supervision of plans, policies, programmes and practices that control, protect, deliver and enhance the value of data and information assets. The ten disciplines defined in the DAMA DMBOK to assist an organisation in managing their data, are shown in Fig PositionIT Nov/Dec 2010

2 Goals of an organisation Depending on different industry sectors, an organisation often has similar goals or objectives, which are ideally to: reduce cost; increase revenue; increase agility; increase compliance; and reduce risk. Enterprise information management assists business in achieving their goals as follows: Reduce costs Integration of data lessens duplication of processes/effort Reduces the need for continuous data cleansing Increase revenue Improved decision making due to trusted information and effectiveness of information delivery Increase agility Improved turnaround time on processes due to information being made available to the right person at the right time Improved customer service Increase compliance Integrated and quality information Verification and validity of the data Reduce risk Reduced risk due to informed decision making Reduced risk of non-compliance due to poor quality of data Fig. 2: Data management body of knowledge (Source: DAMA). So what does GIS bring to the table? More than 80% of all data has a geographic component. Most master data has some location reference. In any organisation a customer or product is always a number one information asset. A customer will always have an address of sorts whether it is physical or postal address has a location reference. Similarly for product, it is often important to know where the product is presently or where its final location will be. GIS assists an organisation with: Data quality management Business intelligence (analytics, information delivery, visualisation) In any information delivery model there are several key components that enable the life cycle of data and creation of information, namely: Acquisition of data (acquisition of external information, this may be required due to legislation requirements or to enrich/quality assure existing datasets) Fig. 3: Information delivery context diagram. Creation of data (creation of core information assets to organisation) Maintenance of data (updates and augmentation and enrichment of data) Consolidation and usage of data (this is where data starts to morph into information) Retirement or archiving of data (stale or out-dated data is often detrimental to an organisation when looking at statistics and this is often neglected). GIS technology (noted as 1 in Fig. 3) can be used to enrich and validate the current data sets such as by PositionIT Nov/Dec

3 inaccurate and that approximately only 20% of the customer base could be displayed on the map. The issues found were: Incomplete customer address records Invalid data in the address fields no validation had been done on these fields. By enforcing the geo-coding as part of the address data capture, we were able to quality assure the information going forward and therefore enable proper reporting on a living map. GIS assisted with data quality at a local metropolitan council with its property information. It not only improved on data quality but built trust in the information for its users and customers. Fig. 4: A Surveyor General approved diagram. Fig. 5: The capture of property as a polygon using a GIS cadastre. The trust in the information was achieved by applying the following steps: Geo-referencing of original documents to real location (in this case a Surveyor General approved diagram). See Fig. 4. The capture of the property as a polygon using a GIS cadastre (an application enabling the capturing of property erven). See Fig. 5. Linking the relevant tabular information to the spatially captured property (i.e. ownership information, valuation information, zoning and address information). And finally if there was any doubt, the aerial photography overlays the GIS cadastre information. The proverbial "seeing is believing" helped build trust and confidence in the information of the organisation. See Fig. 6. The power of visualisation geo-coding customer addresses. It therefore has a role to play in the application layer as shown in Fig. 3. GIS technology (noted as 2 in Fig. 3) enables business intelligence with very effective visualisation. It is possible to bring datasets together from different data sources that have the same geographic location. By using spatial operators like overlay this relates the data sets to each other thus enabling the traditional BI user with a new dimension and new sets of spatial relationships to explore. These then relate back to the data relationships, which are bound to the spatial data. Assisting with data quality management A recent exercise performed by our team at a cellular service provider required that their customer base and related information be depicted on a map. In order to achieve this, the customer address had to be geo-coded. At the start of the exercise it was discovered that the address data was In information delivery the power of visualisation assists businesses with decision-making. Current BI technology falls short of delivering the insight required using traditional reporting and analytical methods. Tabular reports and pie charts for example cannot effectively depict large sets of information in OLAP cubes. Visualisation technology is necessary to effectively synthesise the detailed data into information and present this content in an understandable manner to users. 40 PositionIT Nov/Dec 2010

4 Fig. 6: The aerial photography overlays the GIS cadastre information. Fig. 7: Convergence of BI and GIS trends in the market. The traditional method of representing data to users has been columnar reports, either printed or viewed on the screen in a spreadsheet fashion, or simple graphs and charts (i.e. histograms, pie charts, and bubble maps). But given the complex interrelationships of multidimensional data, can you effectively and efficiently interrogate a large OLAP cube using a simple pie chart? Is it possible to report and communicate all the necessary information content through your dashboard with just a bar graph? Furthermore, by excluding geographic information in the analytic landscape, any data made available for analysis is artificially constrained resulting in decision-making being compromised. The role of spatial analysis in business is too important to be left to IT or GIS specialists. Everybody in the enterprise needs access to the geospatial information. Humans think visually spatially. Therefore, leading BI environments should provide visualisation techniques based on spatial relationships. Interrelationships that might otherwise be difficult to describe or explain are often readily understood when visually presented. The visualisation helps the analyst interrogate the data, while also serving as an excellent means of explaining the information to a broader audience, including executives and customers. It is this visualisation of spatial relationships that delivers accurate, Fig. 8: Traditional business intelligence. high impact informational content, enabling decision makers to gain a fast understanding of the critical issues that lie just beneath the surface of the obvious data. Combining business intelligence and spatial intelligence will enable business with a new dimension in that it will allow the user to simultaneously monitor trends on both the information relationships and spatial relationships. Benefits of GIS technology In conclusion GIS enables enterprise information management to: Reduce cost Reduces the need for continuous data cleansing Master data verification with GIS (street names, postal codes, addresses) Increase revenue Improved decision making due to trusted information and improved information delivery due to the effectiveness of visualisation Increase agility Improved turnaround time on processes due to information being made available to the right person at the right time Improved customer service trusted information Increase compliance Integrated and quality information trusted information Verification and validity of the data using GIS Reduce risk Reduced risk due to informed decision making PositionIT Nov/Dec

5 While there are many solutions in place, which combine the two worlds of traditional BI and GIS, these require customisation. There are very few commercial out of the the box BI tools that enable this tight integration between business data and GIS data layers. Some of the tools provide only a mash-up of the two and this does not enable the user to do off the cuff analytics to reap the full benefit of the convergence of these two technologies. Fig. 9: Combining BI and GIS enables a new dimension for data analysis. DataAssist Spatial Business Intelligence (SBI) is an evolution of traditional business intelligence and geospatial analysis functionality, in one unified tool. Reduced risk of non-compliance due to poor quality of data Less risk of misinterpretation of information due to visualisation BI and GIS convergence Trends in the market In 2007 a lot of work was done on location intelligence in the market, but this was superseded by the acquisitions of BI vendors, which dominated the market untill IBM bought COGNOS, SAP bought Business Objects and Oracle bought Hyperion. In 2009 there was a growth in both user literacy and therefore visualisation requirements with Google Earth really awakening the market to GIS resulting in users wanting their dashboard results on a living map. Historically only scientists and skilled GIS specialists were able to provide these answers to business, which is both a timely and costly undertaking. Providing true business users to spatially interrogate the data and answering the where question visually, addresses the missing link in traditional BI. This is the only product I have seen that combines the BI and GIS worlds seamlessly. Finding the link between business data and spatial data Finding the correct granularity of business data, which you can relate spatially, is tricky and often the more granularity, the more complex the exercise becomes. This requires careful planning and often new business processes to cope with the on-going maintenance of the data. Emergence of new standards for EIM With GIS moving to an enterprise platform there is an emergence of new standards that should be considered and which will bring the two technologies together, namely: Data modeling standards avoid creating data relationships which already exist as spatial relationships as this could create two versions of the truth Data development standards table and attribute/column naming standards Data standards (i.e. address and customer identification). Contact Ana Moreira, Edge Evolve, Tel , amoreira@edgeconsulting.co.za 42 PositionIT Nov/Dec 2010