Locational Business Intelligence: Taking Spatial to the Corporate World Paul Farrel Managing Director NGIS Australia, Australia Email: paul.farrel@ngis.com.au Tong Lim GeoSamba Product Manager NGIS Australia Email: tong.lim@ngis.com.au Abstract Despite rapid advancement, the spatial information industry continues to face significant hurdles convincing the corporate world that GIS can add business value. Traditionally considered a niche tool used by specialists to support a business, GIS now has the potential to move beyond being an operational overhead. Technological advances in spatial information technology and increases in bandwidth have significantly reduced the traditional obstacles of speed and data storage. This paper illustrates how spatial information can be a powerful support to business strategy and execution in the corporate world. It explores the example of a publicly-listed Australian forestry company, which has used spatial information at all levels of its business to provide a strategic competitive advantage in risk management and operational efficiency. In the same way that enterprise systems, such as SAP, permeate throughout an organisation, this case study demonstrates the potential of spatial information technology to add enormous value when implemented with vision and commitment. Introduction Spatial information was traditionally regarded as secondary information to support only a small part of a corporate business. Limitations in areas such as network bandwidth, computer powers and data interoperability had put a lot of restrictions on spatial service providers to build comprehensive spatial systems. Most spatial applications were designed and used mainly by small group of technical specialists. Non-GIS users traditionally had very little interaction with the spatial data. In the 90’s, a lot of nonspatial organisations started to adopt spatial technology and set up small spatial teams responsible for collection and maintaining some GIS data. Non-GIS users normally only receive spatial information in forms of hardcopy maps and textual or tabular formats. Web-GIS applications became popular in the early 2000’s, many organisations started to allow non-technical users to view and query spatial data through standard internet browsers such as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Firefox and Netscape. Even then, the corporate world still did not recognise that GIS could add value to the core business. Most web-GIS applications simply served as a data viewer and provided minimum tools and functionality to allow businesses to integrate the spatial information into the corporates’ other key business process such as the financial systems and document management systems. Ever since the introduction of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) into the spatial industry, we are now starting to see spatial applications playing an importing role in supporting the core business of many large corporations. This paper reviews an application called ForMS (Forestry Management System) designed for Great Southern Plantations in Australia as an example. It illustrates how spatial technology plays an important role and adds value to the corporate world. This paper also explains how an existing silo operating environment was transformed into a highly integrated and efficient plantation management system. ForMS Project Background Great Southern Plantations is an investment manager, specialising in the agribusiness sector in Australia. Since its formation in 1987, Great Southern has focused primarily on the planting and establishment of hardwood plantations. In early 2004, it was recognised that Great Southern’s silo-operating systems did not provide adequate means of managing its plantations nationally, nor did they provide the operational transparency required to demonstrate compliance with stringent environmental standards laid out under ISO14001 and by the Forestry Stewardship Council. Spurred by a need to increase operational efficiency and meet environmental regulatory requirements, Great Southern appointed a spatial service provider to develop a unique, industry leading forestry management system that has revolutionised Great Southern’s nation-wide operation. ForMS has transformed Great Southern’s operating systems, delivering a geographic perspective to the management, automation and optimisation of their business processes. The benefit of location awareness across their nation-wide operation has allowed Great Southern to retain their formidable 35% market share in the Australian agribusiness sector while also delivering increased business intelligence and productivity gains. Great Southern needed a system that allowed users of all level, internally and externally, to have access to one centralised application for logging and tracking all plantation management activities, regardless of their location. A thin-client web-based application was the ideal solution to this requirement. Great Southern also needed the system to be able to generate spatially aware work orders and job requests that could be linked to the accounting system for easy budget control. Design considerations of ForMS End users were an important element of the ForMS system. One of the key requirements for ForMS was the ability for non-GIS users to create and manage Work Programs, Work Orders and Job Requests with minimum training and computer skills. Before ForMS, there were a lot of regional disparities in the recording and management of plantation data. A lot of effort was therefore spent on updating and migration of existing spatial and non-spatial databases and information into a single, common database.  Figure 1: Great Southern’s silo operating structure prior to the implementation of ForMS. Great Southern needed an easy-to-use browser interface that seamlessly integrated with their existing business processes and spatial datasets (shape files and spatial imagery). For example, ForMS interoperates with Great Southern’s accounting system allowing for centralised budgeting, forecasting and invoicing to occur from a single interface. ForMS also allows plantation managers out in the field to log data gathered via GPS to the central database using portable mapping device. Great Southern also needed automated monitoring and notification capability that sends out emergency notifications to neighbouring properties and rental tenants based on some predefined rules.  Figure 2: High level architecture diagram of an integrated work program management system offered by ForMS ForMS is a client-server application developed on a .Net platform, implemented through an open, service-oriented architecture that provides location intelligence to enterprisewide business activities. The ForMS system alleviates the traditional issues faced by developers attempting to link a GIS to a specific relational database, allowing Great Southern to manage each information type with the most suitable data management tool. Scalability and flexibility is an important requirement for Great Southern. Because ForMS uses open web service architecture and component-based approach to software development, the service layer gives ForMS longevity and rigor, allowing Great Southern to easily extend the system, adding new functionality through additional components or by incorporating new web services as required. ForMS was intended to be used by internal staff, contractors, and stakeholders throughout the country. It is important that the end-users can access the system from standard computers without special software or hardware requirement. ForMS offers a ultra-thin Browser Client that is free of plug-ins and guarantees high performance even over the thinnest of bandwidths. The browser interface is user-friendly and highly intuitive. It’s fully customisable to suit individual client needs. A customised GIS tools for plantation management have also been included in the interface. A key advantage to Great Southern adopting a service oriented approach that utilises Web Services, is location transparency. As Great Southern’s operations expanded around Australia, managing the large amount of data from multi-site activities proved problematic. Great Southern are now able to share data and applications across their entire operation, regardless of location. Beyond the obvious efficiency benefits this offers, the other key benefit is that all information managed within the system is accessed directly from the source all the time, guaranteeing its accuracy. This guaranteed accuracy translates directly into better confidence in market response decisions and reduction of business operation risks. Importance of SOA SOA is the key to bringing spatial technology into the corporate world. To break the traditional perception that GIS is just an isolated system used by specialists to support only a small part of the corporate world, spatial software providers must adopt the Service Oriented Architecture approach in designing and implementing their products. Just about every major IT player such as IBM, Microsoft and Oracle sees SOA as an important direction of their businesses. In today’s business environment, large amount of information is coming from different sources and applications with different interfaces. Most systems are stovepipe and focused on the specific business processes and not part of an integrated enterprise. There is a great opportunity for spatial application to serve as a central gateway to wide-range of spatial and non-spatial information stored in various databases and platforms. Commercial sites like some real estate Google Maps mash-up are great examples of business focused solution fed by spatial web services. Web mapping applications alone can be very dried and lacking interactions with other parts of a corporate business. Web Mapping will be seen as an important application when it acts as a connector bridging different business processes together as illustrated in the diagram below:  Figure 3: Example of how Web Services acts as a connector to bridges various business processes together Summary The spatial industry is going through some exciting transitions. It is good to see big players such as Microsoft, Oracle and Google showing interest and investing large amounts of resources into spatial technology. Interesting times are ahead as old standards evolve and new ones appear. SOA seems to be the key to turning traditional spatial applications into core components that provide powerful supports to business strategy and execution in the corporate world. The ForMS system, adopted by Great Southern, is a good example of how a spatial application can play an important role in the corporate world. Hopefully, we will continue to see Spatial become more valued in mainstream business and not just as a fashionable trend. |