The Future of Analytics: Integration of Business and Location Intelligence
On the 3rd of August 2021, Ondrej Tomas, CEO & Co-Founder of CleverMaps, and Zdenek Svoboda, SVP of Product & Co-Founder of GoodData, hosted a webinar on the Future of Analytics: Business and Location Intelligence. They shared interesting thoughts on the future development of analytical ecosystems, enrichment of business intelligence by location insights, and more.
Recently, CleverMaps ran a successful POC with the newly released GoodData.CN platform that shows how well Location Intelligence complements standard Business Intelligence visualizations. But simple combination of the two visualization tools is not enough, GoodData, same as CleverMaps, thinks to the future. And in the future, Business Intelligence is headless.
Data Analytics Today: Inconsistent, Monolithic, Inflexible
These days many companies develop their analytics interfaces using multiple tools and platforms. Consequently, some inconveniences such as different results across these tools can occur because most tools and platforms create another copy of the analyzed data that is nearly impossible to keep updated. Most importantly, each of the tools uses its own proprietary calculation of the results.
Consequences of inconsistent analytics tightly coupled with the insights consumption layer
Modern Analytics: Real-Time, Consistent, Interactive
The concept of Headless BI decouples the data model and computation engine from the insights consumption layer. Meaning that all the aggregations, filters, metrics, and indicators are formed at one place with the same calculation logic and over the same data. This approach ensures that all consumers receive the same and consistent results.
Consistent results for all consumers achieved with the concept of Headless BI
Location Intelligence Today: Monolithic, Manual
Today's Location Intelligence is mainly represented with standard GIS (Geographical Information Systems), working on a completely different basis than most Business Intelligence tools. In most cases, all the analytics must be precalculated outside of the system and then loaded back for the visualization. The visualization itself usually works as a raster picture overlay. There is no data model, no computation engine, limited possibility of real-time analytics. Therefore, limited chance to fit the Headless BI concept.
On the other side of the coin, GIS systems have their place. For some use cases, there are no better choices. However, when it comes to business analytics, a system initially designed for analytics will do a better job and, most importantly, will fit your existing analytics stack.
The principle of today's Location Intelligence
Modern Location Intelligence: Real-Time, Consistent, Interactive
On the other hand, CleverMaps is changing the paradigm of working with location data. The architecture is very similar to most of the BI platforms. The core is the semantic data model that enables a combination of both internal business data and external location data. On top of the data model, metrics and indicators are defined just like in a BI system. This principle allows the separation of the visualization layer from the analytics, as is required for the Headless BI concept.
The principle of Location Intelligence in CleverMaps
Modern Business and Location Intelligence Together
CleverMaps ran a successful POC with GoodData.CN platform that demonstrates the ability of CleverMaps to become a part of the modern analytics ecosystem at any company. After all, data is better understood in context, and what gives the best context to location data than a map?
Combination of BI and Location Insights
Watch The Webinar Recording
For more information on the topic, watch the recording from our webinar.
