USAF Prevents Insomnia with Geospatial

What causes sleepless nights? For sure, too much caffeine can keep your eyelids open, however it’s more likely that worry and anxiety are the source. Fortunately, insomnia’s not the norm for United States Air Force (USAF) general officers and other government officials. That’s because with geospatial capabilities the USAF knows where every aircraft, piece of equipment and part is located and where it’s been—anywhere in the world.

Image Courtesy of Google Maps

Geospatial (also known as location intelligence) is a technology that allows enterprises to store, process and consume geographically based data. Geospatial data can be points (longitude, latitude), lines (a series of points), or even polygons representing a defined boundary. With geospatial, an enterprise can measure distances between two objects, or identify objects within, touching or traversing a specified perimeter. And while approximately 80% of corporate data has a location reference, there are plenty of enterprises not taking advantage of this valuable location information.

At Teradata Partners conference 2011 in San Diego, California, speakers Tim Cotton and Teal Walker presented how geospatial capabilities benefit the USAF. Specifically, leveraging data integrated from over one-hundred sources into Teradata database and Google Maps for visualization purposes, the USAF provides its users trusted information for inventory control including drill down capabilities to the part and supply level. And with geospatial, officials can visually examine where a particular asset has been throughout its lifecycle.

Teradata and Google Maps also help the USAF visually monitor “exceptions” via alerts—in real time—to track movement of materials, vehicles, commodities and assets. Now any aircraft or equipment going to the wrong place can be identified quickly and rerouted.  And lastly with geospatial capabilities, the USAF can easily perform “proximity analysis” to immediately discover assets nearby and available to maintain mission support.

Geospatial enables “big picture” location analysis. The USAF knows where its assets are located at all times, and can direct them quickly should the need arise. Important operational details are captured and readily available via this geospatial solution, allowing government officials to clear their minds and get a good night’s sleep.

The USAF can pinpoint and direct its most productive assets at a moment’s notice. Shouldn’t your business have this same advantage?

Beyond ZIP +4 to Location Intelligence

In the United States, ZIP +4 assists marketers in targeting customers by city, neighborhood, or street, but geospatial location intelligence can help marketers perform much deeper analysis. And “analysis” is where the real value of geospatial lies.

A ZIP + 4 code according to Wikipedia; “uses the basic five-digit code plus four additional digits to identify a geographic segment within the five-digit delivery area, such as a city block, or a group of apartments.” And since the introduction of ZIP + 4 in 1983, this feature has assisted direct marketers (not to mention the USPS) in saving millions of dollars in costs.

While some marketers may decide that ZIP +4 is enough for customer targeting purposes, they’re missing out on a whole level of analysis available from geospatial that can help squeeze more return on investment from scarce marketing dollars.

The term “geospatial” describes a specific type of analytical software combined with geographic data. Going much further than simple ZIP +4 formats, geospatial comes to life via the transformation of a customer address into geographic coordinates (latitude and longitude). With geospatial, a whole host of marketing analytics is now available to marketers. Examples include:

• Map locations. By overlaying geospatial data types with a mapping tool (such as Google Earth) marketers can pinpoint store or office locations in proximity to customers.
• Calculate distances between locations. Stores, offices or distribution centers can be precisely calculated and then evaluated to examine if they are too close or too far apart. For example, marketers can determine the midpoint between two stores to meet the needs of an under-served customer segment. With geospatial, there’s no guessing, whereas it’s pretty difficult to calculate the distance between locations with ZIP +4.
• Marketing by the mile (or less). Suppose you have a specific store location and you want to market to households 5.1 miles to the north, 2.5 miles to the south, etc; essentially building your own polygon for direct marketing purposes. With geospatial capability, you can do this exercise; ZIP +4—not so much.
• Disaster planning. When an event occurs, let’s say a hurricane is brewing, will you be able to see which stores will be in its path? How about households? How might this event affect your ongoing or future marketing campaigns?
• Risk management. Customer concentration or density analysis (Fig 1) can identify specific areas in which you may be taking on too much risk.

Figure 1. A visual example of density analysis. Source

Some marketers want to know, in comparing ZIP +4 vs. geospatial—which is best? The answer depends on your specific problem, resource constraints, and level of analysis required.

ZIP +4 can help a marketer drill down towards a fairly small area for targeting and the process of converting a mailing list to ZIP +4 is relatively inexpensive. Whereas, adding geo-spatial capabilities usually involves use of an analytical infrastructure (database and hardware), software applications (i.e. data integration and visualization tools), and both technical and business know-how to perform analysis and act upon newly discovered information.

ZIP +4 may work best as an inexpensive way to improve customer targeting. However, as seen from the above marketing examples, geospatial capabilities open a whole host of analytical options for marketers that ZIP +4 just cannot match.

Questions:

• With three billion mobile phone users in the world (and growing) will “location” become an increasingly important component of marketing in the next 3-5 years?
• A business intelligence infrastructure is a necessary pre-cursor to geospatial analysis. What does this say about the skill sets marketers will need in the future to perform such analysis?

GPS and Geospatial: A Revolution in the Making?

Most telecommunication companies now have the ability to assign the latitude and longitude of a mobile handset via technologies such as GPS and Wi-Fi. With these technologies a whole host of location based services and applications can now accurately find both people and objects. However, the ability to track individuals in space and time with location-aware technologies has left some privacy advocates a bit queasy. Can the power of the GPS revolution be harnessed for good—or will it ultimately reduce our collective freedoms? read more