Issue link: https://resources.esri.ca/i/1313392
35 | GEOSPATIAL STRATEGY ESSENTIALS FOR MANAGERS MATTHEW LEWIN • Emergency procedures are followed in the event of a voting place incident • Voting places close on time and all remaining electors waiting in line are processed These are essential outcomes for a well-run election. Each must be realized. A misstep on any one of these and the city has problems. How can spatial thinking help? For that, we turn to the geospatial lens. The Geospatial Lens Before I show you how to apply the geospatial lens, let's review what it is. The lens is a compilation of general-purpose use cases that describes how spatial thinking and geospatial technology can be used to support business decision making. It's derived from six key geospatial analysis concepts and four key business analytics concepts. On the geospatial side, the lens consists of the spatial concepts of location, scale, route, distribution, proximity and correlation. These are specific types of analysis unique to geography. Much of geospatial analysis revolves around understanding geographic relationships based on one or more of these concepts. On the business side, the lens consists of four key analytics concepts: describe, diagnose, predict and prescribe. These are the general forms of business analytics. The majority of data- driven decision-making falls into one of these four types. To create the lens, we join the two sides together. It's a simple process but the results are surprisingly powerful. By merging geospatial analysis with business analytics, we get a rich set of geospatial analysis patterns focused on the core aspects of business decision-making. And because they cover historical analysis and future- trend analysis, they are broadly applicable. The lens is not meant to be technical. That's not its function. It's intended to help people understand how geospatial capabilities can be applied to solve business problems. It allows a person to quickly assess and apply geospatial capabilities to their business without getting bogged down in technical minutiae. Often, the tendency when prospecting is to focus on familiar ways to solve problems. The lens breaks you out of that habit by presenting analysis patterns that you might have overlooked—particularly those that cross over into the realms of advanced analytics. Note: I've written about finding geospatial opportunities in previous articles. The intention of this approach is not to replace that process, but to evolve and simplify it for a broader audience by introducing the geospatial lens, which abstracts out analysis from the underlying technology. The old way still works great; it just requires more familiarity with specific geospatial technologies. Uncovering Opportunities Using the geospatial lens is straightforward: work through the use cases and consider how each applies to your business needs. Where one (or more) looks applicable, translate the general form of the use case into a specific case relevant to your business situation. Let's return to our voting place management example. Specifically, let's look at the key business outcomes, in particular, the first outcome associated with voting place openings. Which use cases apply? As it turns out, several of them.