Spatial Enablement of Enterprise Data - Geocoding

In this and the next few blog posts, I will provide an overview of geocoding – leveraging the location component in data – and how that can offer organizations new insights to help them operate more efficiently, and offer better and new solutions which ultimately lead to increased revenue. Although organizations in utilities, logistics and retail sectors have been leveraging the “power of place” for some time, many other organizations have recently realized they can unlock additional insight by spatially enabling their data. An article I wrote on GIS/ERP system integration chronicles some of these drivers. It also discusses the power of the map as the UI.

About 80% of enterprise data has a location component to it. Whether it’s an address of a customer, a supplier or a retailer, organizations are realizing there is a lot of value to adding a spatial dimension to their data in terms of the insight they can gain. Adding this dimension starts with geocoding. Geocoding is the process of obtaining a spatial coordinate or location (a point consisting of latitude and longitude) for an address. An address can be very specific (street and house number), or more general: a census block group, census track (neighborhood), ZIP Code, Postal Code, City, State, and Countries. The inverse of geocoding is called reverse geocoding – this is the process of taking a location (a point) and determining the closest address to that point. I will discuss this in another blog post.

Once a location component is identified and geocoded, advanced analytics can be applied to give an organization insight like:

• How many customers who make over $75,000/year, are college educated, fitness minded and have children live within 5 miles of a given store? 
• How many of a health network’s patients come from within a 30 minute drive time of a health care facility?
• How do we optimize the route of field crews to minimize their windshield (drive) time?
• Should we alert our customers to avoid a certain section of a city?

An organization equipped with the above insights stands to reduce their costs (fuel, maintenance, labor) and increase their revenue (better placement of stores, ability to deliver more packages per unit time, ability to offer better routing).

There are many providers that offer geocoding services (cloud-based) and on premise appliances and software.  They vary in accuracy, cost and speed. The accuracy needed depends upon the business requirements - is street block level accuracy sufficient? If you're doing customer deliveries, planning routes or providing emergency services, more accuracy is required. If you're analyzing patient medical data, it may be against regulations (at least in the United States) to identify a specific patient. For example, the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services makes available Hospital Service Area data files. Patient information is aggregated to the ZIP Code level for this reason. Other considerations include data volume and velocity (how many attributes to geocode and how fast).

Think about how adding the "power of place" to your enterprise data can provide insight your organization hasn't had before. In the next blog post, I’ll discuss geocoding accuracy. Thanks for reading.