The changing business opportunities of modern location intelligence

What are your memories of business technology in 2010? When it comes to processes and tasks that required location-based information and analysis, the world looked quite different from 2023. Let’s take a closer look at four industry examples of how business decisions were handled in 2010 to help us understand how far business solutions have come in the meantime.

Case A: Geographic business expansion

Consider a business in hospitality that wants to expand to a different country. The ideal way of doing this was visiting the country, analyzing the areas with other hotels, finding tourist destinations, touring important monuments, and checking hospitability demand near them. Some management teams sent their trusted staff members along with local business analysts to recce and decide. Others hired agents in the new country and fed them with requirements, thus, trusting their reports. Both ways involved an additional expenditure of hiring and/or traveling.

Case B: Navigation in emergencies

Even the 5-star rated hospitals in the city relied on roadside navigation and direction boards for the ambulance commute. Routes were figured out on the go, even during emergencies. New blood banks had to be discovered in situations of shortages. The supply chain solutions facilitating the transport of medicines and vaccines were unorganized. The road maps were static, without mechanisms for modification according to the current situation.

Case C: Preparing for natural disasters

Businesses weren’t prepared for the climatic situations. Certain areas that were constantly hit by a hurricane, floods, storms, earthquakes, etc. lacked preventive measures. New businesses unaware of the climatic hazards often ended up investing in such places and suffering major losses as a result.

Case D: Connecting field reps to HQ

A salesperson or a field rep could only be tracked over a mobile call or a pager. The whereabouts could be traced only by calling, asking, and trusting. In the case of ad hoc requests, it was difficult to reroute a rep to the ad hoc location near him. Similarly, the reps could not avail any help immediate or otherwise. The organizations continued to survive such situations, but paying the price by inconveniencing clients, reps, and managers and driving down efficiency.

The dawn of location intelligence

It was in late 2012 or early 2013 that location intelligence made an appearance in the universe of businesses. It was and still is popularly considered part of the broader area of business intelligence. Location intelligence defines the insights gained from visualizing and analyzing geospatial data. Geo-mapping location-specific data such as demographics, traffic, environmental conditions, economics, and weather on a smart map or dashboard reveals unique insights that cannot be derived from tabular, chart format, or even pie chart format data.