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?
Select customers within 5 miles of a “path”
Taking a map of customer locations
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

What is Business Intelligence?
Competitive
Information Knowledge advantage,
Data
profit
• Cause and effect
• Data Integration
• Structured •Better
• Reporting
• Aggregation
Decisions
• Data Warehousing • Analysis
•Accurate
(Data Mining,OLAP)
• Data Marts
Management
• Distribution
based on the
numbers.
DW
DM DM
WWW.COM
• Un-structured
User experience

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.

Types of Business Intelligence Users
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 ?
Operations Management
Continual Dashboards, ad-hoc & guided
process analysis, collaboration
Front Line
Employees
Reports, actions,
and tasks

Example of Business Intelligence Output

Example of Business Intelligence Output - workflow
• 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 ?

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

Location Intelligence for better business understanding
Location Competetive
Information Knowledge
Intelligence advantage,
Data
profit
• Visualising
• Cause and effect • Clearer
• Data Integration Performance
• Structured
• Reporting understanding
• Aggregation
• Data Warehousing • Analysis •Better
•Analysing
(Data Mining,OLAP) Decisions
• Data Marts based on
• Distribution •Accurate
Location
Management
•More
•BI with
effective
FACTS
Planning
DW integrated with
•Better
Location
resource
Intelligence
utilisation
DM DM
WWW.COM
• Un-structured
Enhanced
Demo GIS
User
Graphics Enriched Improved
Analysis
Data 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

The Location Intelligence Component (LIC)
What is the LIC?
MapInfo Intelligence systems allow users environment so that
Business adds access to mapping in the BI to view information on
users can view information through a map.
company performance

The Location Intelligence Component (LIC)
A drill-down capability is available that allows users to drill
A toolbar is added so that users can interact with the map.
down into the defined geographical hierarchy obtaining
Standard features such as pan, zoom, layer control and
more granular information. Drilling in the map produces a
info tool are available.
corresponding change in the report…the bi-directional
querying capability.

The Location Intelligence Component (LIC)
A user can drill down to the record level and from there, use a
Once the spatial querya results. MapInfo adds map and report
variety of tools to filterisradial selection the a spatial filtering
submitted, both
Here‟s an example of
reflect the change.
ability.

The Location Intelligence Component (LIC)
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 Location Intelligence Component (LIC)
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 Location Intelligence Component (LIC)
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

Concepts
Map Content and Bind Layer
Data from BI
TAB file (Geometry only)
Report
Controlled by named
layers in mapping
Data from report
engine
put into a memory
array (Utilizes custom Data
Report Provider to perform
Layer Data Binding)
Additional Map
Layers
(Must have
Base
corresponding
Map Named Resource file)

Concepts (cont.)
Internal Binding (lat/long values in report)

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