Dr. David Paschane, Lead
Geo-Enabled Business Practices Committee
Federal Geospatial Line of Business
Introduction
According to OMB's analysis of Federal programs, agencies operate over 1,000 major businesses. Each business affects Americans through numerous impacts on individuals, institutions, and markets. The executive managers of these businesses are responsible for organizational strategy, agency performance, and the distribution of outcomes. Fulfilling these responsibilities requires capturing significant amounts of complex information, synthesizing it for timely decision-making, and then updating the information to identify how well the business is meeting constituent and institutional needs. Although information systems exist for supporting such business intelligence, many Federal managers are not ready to transition from their current decision-making methods to those that are cornerstones to private businesses. The hesitation to adopt contemporary analytic methods may be due to the lack of clarity as to how these methods are useful and how they can be implemented without risk to existing operations.
This portfolio of business cases is a primer for Federal mangers to adopt a foundational business intelligence capability into their management design. In its basic form, geospatial analyses are simply ways of knowing the relative location of business elements and factors. The knowledge is intuitive to managers because it is essentially a map of the business, customers, and anything else that relates to decision-making. Federal managers speak geographically, but the institutional capacity for geospatial analyses is often inadequate for supporting business requirements.
The power in geospatial analyses is two fold. First, it is a manageable approach to disparate information. The software that supports these analyses allows a business to collect all forms of data about any number of factors and combine these by their respective location. The manager is not restricted to information that is organized by spreadsheets and corresponding graphics. Digital mapping of geospatial data provides for active business intelligence. Second, geospatial analyses can represent the true complexity of real world interactions and variation. Because the data is organized, analyzed, and represented according to its location, managers are not limited in their questions about why outcomes vary as they do, how can they be changed, who can change them, and how will their decisions make a difference. It is this power of timely insight that has made geospatial analyses popular among managers of private businesses---they can see how the dynamic intersection between variable products and customers and develop a set of strategies that maximizes their business success.
The geospatial business portfolio is organized in to three chapters. The first chapter is a description of standard geospatial analyses that support business intelligence for managers. The second chapter includes ten possible geospatial business cases for collaborative solutions to meet national goals. The third chapter is a demonstration of a collaborative business case that illustrates a range of management decisions that are supported through geospatial business intelligence.
Description of standard geospatial analyses that support business intelligence for managers...
Descriptions and examples for each:
- Customer /client demography
- Distribution of agencies' expenditures
- Variance of utilization or other outputs
- Variance of outcomes
- Workforce locations
- Infrastructure locations
- Variance in performance / needs
- Changes in the context
- Revenue by multipliers, offsets, interest
- Jurisdictional representation / regulation
Points to emphasize:
- Geospatial capacity includes an institutional commitment for appropriate data acquisition, development of analytic staff, and supportive digital technologies that can be combined to refine and mature digital data into information, then knowledge, then understanding, then a decision or action, followed by updating the information to identify its impact.
- The comparative value of geospatial business strategies is in the capacity to combine disparate data and represent true complexity, through a dynamic system that provides comprehensive, accurate, multi-factorial, and timely information.
- Federal business managers need these analyses to support strategic decision-making where multiple factors drive changes, and multiple interests want explanations for outcomes.
The structure of a business case:
- Business Justification - National goals / collaborative partners
- Analytic Development - potential solution strategy
- Information Maturity - capacity and organization
- Data Acquisition - build, buy, or share, with metadata
- Value Monitoring - collaboration, tracking, dissemination
Topics for ten business cases:
- Managing population and service logistics in emergencies
- Mitigating homeland security threats
- Enabling employability in the emerging workforce
- Sustaining access to health care networks
- Enabling education achievement and advancement
- Fostering economic development and growth
- Modeling energy production and distribution
- Identifying transportation infrastructure needs
- Identifying Federal land use and conversion opportunities
- Monitoring demographic impacts on entitlements
Demonstration of a collaborative business case that illustrates a range of management decisions that are supported through geospatial business intelligence...
Management decisions include options to change or affect the findings listed above.
Points to emphasize:
- The complexity of the issues that the business is trying to affect, and the decisions the manager has to make regarding workforce, technology, information, and resources, while minimizing error and excessive costs.
- The role of the geospatial analyses in terms of the decisions to affect organizational strategy, agency performance, and the distribution of outcomes.
- Decisions meant to achieve desired outcomes through optimizing the current and future state of the business performance (long-term, annual, or cumulative).
The decisions are generally identified as affecting:
- Cost
- Risk
- Accessibility
- Reliability
- Robustness
- Stability
- Flexibility
- Simplicity
- Reversibility
Decisions are often meant to change something through:
- Substitution
- Rearrangement or dispersion
- Modification
- Combination
The criteria for decisions are often based on analyses to determine:
- Affordability
- Political viability
- Cost-benefit
- Administrative operability
- Efficiency of allocation
- Opportunity costs
