business intelligence and the lic

Business Intelligence and the LIC

Ashish Singh, Engineering Manager

Agenda

• What is the LIC?

• What is Business Intelligence?

• The LIC in action

• Brief intro to architecture

What is the LIC?

The LIC stands for:

Location Intelligence Component

The LIC is a product that is an add-on to

a business intelligence system to

provide users with the ability to

visualize and query data with a

geographical or spatial perspective

Currently, Pitney Bowes MapInfo delivers

these solutions on the MicroStrategy®

and Business Objects® platforms for

business intelligence

Services engagements have also been

delivered on the Cognos® platform

What does the LIC do?

Taking standard Grid reports

And translating the

information into

maps within the

Business

Intelligence

environment

What does the LIC do?

Taking a map of customer locationsSelect customers within 5 miles of a “path”

And obtain the resulting grid

All occurs within the Business Intelligence environment

All occurs within the Business Intelligence environment

In this case - Dashboards

What is Business Intelligence?

Business intelligence is the use of information that enables organizations to best decide, measure, manage and optimize performance to achieve efficiency and financial benefit.

- Gartner, 2006

• Business Intelligence is pervasive within organizations

• It is the accepted, IT standard for distributing reports and information

• BI market…..approximately $50 billion per year with a growth rate in

the low teens….In addition, surveys continually rank BI as a top priority

in corporate IT budgets.

Information week March 2007

Information

DW

• Data Integration

• Aggregation

• Data Warehousing

• Data Marts

DM DM

Knowledge

• Cause and effect

• Reporting

• Analysis

(Data Mining,OLAP)

• Distribution

Competitive

advantage,

profit

•Better

Decisions

•Accurate

Management

based on the

numbers.

User experience

Data

• Structured

• Un-structured

WWW.COM

What is Business Intelligence?

Forms of BI -- How is it delivered?

• Scorecards & Dashboards

Highly visual, informative and summarized views of an organizations performance. May include „alerts‟ to highlight areas of concern.

• Ad-Hoc-Reporting Query + Analysis (inc. OLAP)

The ability to dynamically ask questions of an organizations data and interactively analyze and investigate the results. Designed for the analyst who requires more than standard reports.

• Standard Reporting / Enterprise Reporting

Deliver detailed operational information in a fixed format typically published to many users across an organization. Eg. Daily Sales Orders report ?

• Predictive + Statistical Analysis

Full investigative query against the data warehouse down to the transaction level, allowing power users and professional analysts to perform extensive predictive and statistical analyses

• Alerts & Proactive Notification

Information delivery to very large user populations both internal and external to the enterprise based on schedules, business exceptions or demand.

BI is increasingly used at Senior Management and Board levels to assist translate strategy into operational and process improvements

Executive Management

Scorecards, trends, exceptions,

strategy maps, What if analysis ?

Front Line

Employees

Reports, actions,

and tasks

Continual

process

Operations ManagementDashboards, ad-hoc & guided

analysis, collaboration

Types of Business Intelligence Users

Example of Business Intelligence Output

• Dashboard summarises performance, highlights concern areas

• CLICK into Scorecard to track performance according to goals

• CLICK into specific goal to see „trend‟

• CLICK into report to try to uncover the cause / see evidence and try to answer question….

• What to do next ?

Example of Business Intelligence Output - workflow

What was missing ?

• LOCATION INFORMATION / LOCATION INTELLIGENCE

• Most Organizations :-

– Measure performance by geography

• Sales performance, Cost Performance, People Performance, Customer breakdowns,

– Market by geography

• Target marketing, merchandising

– Plan by geography

• Telecom build out, store trade area analysis

– Assign assets by geography

• Assigning services management, law enforcement resources, engineering resources

– Track resources by geography

• Analyze customers and support needs by sales territories

– Manage services by geography

• Customer Services, financial services, management services

What was missing ?

Location Intelligence can and

should be an integral part of the

dashboard visualization

solutions that are being

delivered within an

organization.

But… it is more than simple

Visualization

Data

• Structured

• Un-structured

WWW.COM

Information

DW

• Data Integration

• Aggregation

• Data Warehousing

• Data Marts

DM DM

Knowledge

• Cause and effect

• Reporting

• Analysis

(Data Mining,OLAP)

• Distribution

Location Intelligence for better business understanding

Location

Intelligence

GISDemo

Graphics

• Visualising

Performance

•Analysing

based on

Location

•BI with

FACTS

integrated with

Location

Intelligence

Enriched

Data

Enhanced

User

Analysis

Competetive

advantage,

profit

• Clearer

understanding

•Better

Decisions

•Accurate

Management

•More

effective

Planning

•Better

resource

utilisation

Improved

Performance

What was missing ?

• Geographic Visualization

– A map allows users to see spatial patterns, trends and view relative performance that are often impossible to see using only reports, charts and graphs.

• Bi-Directional Interaction

– The LIC allows higher level analysis by providing the ability to pass data from a report to a map and from the map to back to the report.

• Spatial Filtering

– Geographic filtering enables users to incorporate a spatial dimension to analyzing and modifying a report to show spatial relationships and clustering trends.

• Enrich BI data

– Demographic, location data can be used to enrich and add value to the core BI data in the Data Warehouse.

How is this sold?

• Currently sold directly through

MapInfo

• MapInfo has dedicated a business

development sales overlay focused

completely on selling the LIC

• MapInfo Professional Services are

required for installation,

configuration and customization

• Most accounts today require post

installation support from MapInfo

services and engineering

Ensuring a successful deployment

• Services require specific knowledge of

the LIC, not MapXtreme or Envinsa

• Services require knowledge of the BI

environment

– Use cases of BI users

– Data Models specific to BI vendor

– Report/dashboard creation

– Hierarchy building

Success to date?

• Business is growing: 13 new customers

over the past year

• Total New revenue is approximately

$2.3M (includes software, data and

services)

• Vertically, success is coming from the

public sector and retail, with one

Large customer in insurance

• Geographically, most sales have come

through the Americas, although 2

recent sales closed in EMEA and APAC

has recently been enabled to deliver

LIC Customers - Sold

http://www.coxcommunications.com/

The Location Intelligence Component (LIC)

What is the LIC?

Business Intelligence systems allow users to view information on

company performance

MapInfo adds access to mapping in the BI environment so that

users can view information through a map.


A toolbar is added so that users can interact with the map.

Standard features such as pan, zoom, layer control and

info tool are available.

A drill-down capability is available that allows users to drill

down into the defined geographical hierarchy obtaining

more granular information. Drilling in the map produces a

corresponding change in the report…the bi-directional

querying capability.


A user can drill down to the record level and from there, use a

variety of tools to filter results. MapInfo adds a spatial filtering

ability.Here‟s an example of a radial selectionOnce the spatial query is submitted, both the map and report

reflect the change.


With the combination of the filtering capabilities of the BI system

and the MapInfo spatial queries, users have powerful tools for

insight into their business.

“Who are our customers within 1 mile of 34th Street in NYC that

spent at least $3000 ?”

Our Targeted List


The LIC is currently available for

MicroStrategy as release 1.0

Business Objects as release 0.9 – (version 1.0 due out within 6

months)

And as a service engagement for other vendors, most notably

integrations with Cognos.


The LIC is delivered on CD and is ALWAYS sold with

Quick Start Services

1 Year of Maintenance and Support

Customization is available to enhance the capabilities within

one‟s BI environment.

Look what MapInfo did for Guy Carpenter…

Here we see accumulated policy risk within 1,2,5 miles of

selected “targets” from within Guy Carpenter‟s MicroStrategy

environment.

Architecture

Additional Map

Layers

Report

Layer

Base

Map

(Utilizes custom Data

Provider to perform

Data Binding)

(Must have

corresponding

Named Resource file)

TAB fileData from BI

Report (Geometry only)

Controlled by named

layers in mapping

engineData from report

put into a memory

array

Map Content and Bind Layer

Concepts

Internal Binding (lat/long values in report)

Concepts (cont.)

External Binding (geography in external TAB file)

Services Provided

• ANT based install

– No GUI installation currently

– Manually configure .bat in user environment

• Manual configuration

– 2 XML files to configure for using the LIC

– No GUI configuration tool

• Data bindings/data models

• Creation of Custom Geographical Layers

• Creation of geographical hierarchies

Thank You

Ashish_singh@pb.

com