GIS and business intelligence (BI) have traditionally addressed differing issues in organizations and have resided in mutually exclusive operational silos. Both technologies have matured into viable enterprise solutions that fit well in today's IT environments so it comes as no surprise that organizations are now looking to integrate the applications to improve the return on IT investment and improve overall business performance.
The BI community is looking to enhance the analytic capabilities of their applications because they now realize that location can have a profound impact on behaviors and outcomes. Furthermore, the ability of a map to present data as actionable information fits well with the BI trend to exploit visualization technology for more efficient communication.
The GIS community benefits from the ability of BI to create a common point of access to disparate organizational data sets. BI also provides very robust enterprise reporting environments which broadens and secures the distribution of GIS enhanced reports. Recently many BI platforms have incorporated sophisticated analytic applications which can now be leveraged by GIS.
This whitepaper provides an overview of the convergence of GIS and BI, the business case for integration, and various integration strategies in use today. It also briefly describes some of the more popular applications being deployed by various industries, such as retail, manufacturing, and financial services.
