Pearson lowers its costs while helping instructors plan lessons faster
SpatialKey puts spatial intelligence in business users’ hands for more insightful decision making
The next generation location intelligence solution, enabling interactive analyses and reports to be created and shared by business decision makers in minutes
Our Challenge
Location is a key data point that helps organizations better understand their business. Diverse industries depend on location intelligence (LI) to make decisions, whether it’s insurance companies analyzing the impact of a hurricane on local policies to assess risk exposure, emergency response teams needing to effectively deploy resources in affected areas, or sales VPs analyzing sales performance per region to maximize revenues.
But although 80% of business data has a location component, few businesses take full advantage of location-based analysis since it traditionally requires expensive BI, or GIS (Geographic Information System) tools only accessible by specialized analysts. Another drawback of traditional tools is that they produce static maps. If a new question is asked, the analysts must create a new report, which further delays decision-making. Business users’ “what if” questions take too long to get answered or don’t get asked at all, which impacts decisions.
Universal Mind, a digital solutions agency that claims rich Internet applications as its foundation, saw an opportunity to help decision makers take full advantage of location intelligence. It began to develop SpatialKey.
Our Process
Universal Mind’s goal was to leverage their existing experience in data visualization to create a location intelligence solution that was faster, more intuitive, less expensive, and more interactive than traditional GIS/LI tools. A solution used by business users, not just data analysts.
During the Discovery Phase, Universal Mind’s experience designers delved into existing BI and GIS tools and gathered feedback from customers, users, and GIS experts. Their recommendation: a solution with a user-friendly Flex interface.
While in Development, Universal Mind technologists addressed the long load times of traditional solutions by creating a new way of visualizing location-based data using Flash. This method provided a lightweight solution that could process very large datasets faster than traditional tools, enabling decision makers to get answers to “what if” questions on-the-fly, instead of waiting hours or days. Also, since the data is not aggregated, users can export the subset of data they’re interested in for use in other business processes.
Universal Mind also decided to deploy SpatialKey as a SaaS (Software as a Service) that leverages state-of-the-art security. SpatialKey is built on top of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform and uses the Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3) as part of its infrastructure.
The Result
SpatialKey, a product and wholly owned subsidiary of Universal Mind, helps decision makers understand and communicate the where and when of their data. They can easily and collaboratively visualize, analyze, and share time- and location-based information critical to everyday decision-making. The application’s intuitive interface lets them get started in minutes, without technical training. Everything is done in the browser, so there’s no software to manage and maintain.
Many organizations are using SpatialKey either out-of-the-box or customized to meet their specific requirements. Take for example the researchers who work for Armed Conflict and Location Event Data Project (ACLED), an international organization that tracks human atrocities in war zones. “SpatialKey has reduced a complex process that took weeks for us to complete to something we can do in the space of a few minutes,” says Dr. Clionadh Raleigh, Director of ACLED. “This allows us to focus much more time on understanding and communicating the findings in our data and much less time painstakingly creating visualizations of it.”
“The level and richness of visualization in SpatialKey is beyond compare,” adds Jim Nichols, Engineer at EnerNOC, a fast-growing player in the energy industry that helps drive better, smarter use of energy. To more easily identify potential efficiencies, EnerNOC adopted SpatialKey to unlock EnerNOC’s energy usage data, transforming it into rich, interactive visualizations and analyses that make customer usage patterns instantly clear.
Eric Yohay, User Acquisition at BuyWithMe, sums it up, speaking in reference to the company’s geo-focused marketing and sales efforts. “SpatialKey gives us incredible insights to fine tune on a dime. We can make decisions in an hour with SpatialKey that used to take a month.”
