Understanding the Role of Geospatial Insight in Digital Transformation

As MD of emapsite, I’ve found that despite the year-on-year increase in the use of ‘Geospatial Insight’ across various industries such as Telecommunications, Insurance, Energy, Utilities, and Infrastructure, to the uninitiated, it can be an inherently difficult concept to grasp.

This sometimes poses an issue when it comes to factoring use cases into any digital transformation strategy as, for some, it can be a relatively “unknown beast”. This is also especially true when attempting to weigh any perceived risks and associated costs to a business’s digital transformation, against the clear benefits that geospatial data can provide.

It doesn’t need to be a difficult concept though.

We’ve been supplying mapping, providing geospatial insights, and sourcing location data that have provided valuable answers to business-critical questions for over 20 years. As well as that, as a small, flexible, and very capable agile business, my team have the knowhow, in addition to the tech.

We also know a good thing or two about supporting businesses in the innovative leveraging of geospatial data for their own digital transformation strategy, while also helping them to reduce waste and impact on the environment through our sustainable processes.

We get that being a ‘corporate pioneer’ is always going to be a challenge, and we very often help our own customers by providing some reassurance that the cost, risk, and outcome equation is known and acceptable.

So, first off, what is ‘Geospatial Insight’ really?

Using IBM’s definition; geospatial insight, or in short, the data “…is information that describes objects, events or other features with a location on or near the surface of the earth”.

Armed with this information though, you may find yourself asking; “Well, isn't that every piece of information that exists?” And well, yes, you'd be completely right.

The information that we’re referring to here could be information about any object. But, if you think through the usefulness of that information, then quite quickly you begin to realise that knowing that an object exists, as well as knowing its broad location, is only of so much use to anyone.

Soon it becomes quite obvious that a more accurate understanding of its location may well be useful. For example, to say that a shop is located in Slough, is of some interest and usefulness, but to say it is at ‘x’ High Street is more useful if you’re actually trying to find it.

Where geospatial data really comes into its own though is when the location of an object is mathematically extractable relative to other items. This benefit of highly accurate positioning is the key thing that provides businesses with the opportunity to create insight from the interrelationship between the objects and the distance between them.

With this information you can calculate risk or cost, as proximity is of significant importance in predicting the cost of failure, or the cost of maintenance. The broad term ‘location insight’ is simply clever language for this whole concept.

What value does geospatial data deliver in digital transformation?

Digital transformation is such a broad description of business change that it’s actually quite hard to generalise the value derived from it. Instead, if you think about the challenges that come from businesses not having fully embraced their own digital transformation, the value of geospatial data becomes more apparent.

For these types of businesses, they usually go through a series of business activities always managed by ‘local intelligence’ e.g., having people visit a place in order to carry out a business process. This could also include those more end-to-end digital businesses who could potentially save money and time by better organising their in-the-field assets.

For businesses managing widely dispersed assets, such as those in Energy, Utilities, Telecommunications, or Infrastructure, the planning of maintenance activity may involve many moving parts: contracts, contractors, time, risk, peril, safety, legal responsibility, and so on. By ‘geocoding’ that data, they’re then able to track many objects or assets being moved from one place to another easily - helping to improve the quality and efficiency of their work.