Something I looked into in 2009 was the combination of location-aware business process management. I liaised with a GIS outfit in the US called IntegralGIS to look into GIS-enabled processes. This is becoming a lot more relevant outside of simple scenarios. Aviva and Prudential in the UK have implemented claims processing and decisioning based on locational information, so much like in the scenario pointed out regarding flood warnings etc they can make decisions a lot quicker based on available GIS data which wasn’t available before.
Traditional BI looks at ‘who’, ‘what’ and ‘why’, but has ignored the core analytical dimension of ‘where’. A report by Ventana Research found that 61% of organisations using location data helps to improve customer service so can it be done for BPM also ?
A recent MyCustomer article on the subject articulated that location awareness is an enabler of business decisions. It helps organisations to optimise their strategy, operations and performance through the provision of analytically driven intelligence and insights. Location Aware technologies also improve and accelerate business efficiency and performance, particularly in customer/citizen centric processes. A Location Aware solution integrated with an existing customer database enables an organisation to visually identify its most valuable customers; better asses risk scenarios, see how demographics correlate with specific objectives or revenue goals, and target new customers/citizens with similar demographic characteristics.
So would location data improve not only BI and decision making but also improve process efficiency too ?
In the same way Social is opening doors to collaboration and transparency, location is doing much the same from a different perspective, enabling both to work together would be something else indeed…
