New Website Coming Soon!

We are very excited to say that we are currently building our new (and first) website.  Whew, at last!!  Official launch of our new site is set for 1st August 2014.  The new site will then replace this ol' blog.  As our first ever blog or internet presence, this site will be remembered fondly, it taught us a lot and certainly served its purpose which was to claim our piece of cyber space, and announce "We are here!" while we went about the process of channeling our energies into shaping and defining Spatial Insights as an entity.

This little company has sailed the high seas over the past year, we have seen many changes, some minor and others major!  Spatial Insights is a very different entity today than how we started out, and it was those founding energies that have brought us to where we are today and I for one, am grateful for that!

Our new url will be published here as soon as the site has been finalised, so keep a look out..

A New Perspective

A recent PwC report on the insurance industry has me thinking. The report outlines how Big Data and smart analytics can be used to generate business insights. More specifically, insights which lead to scenarios enabling the development of solutions which generate value.

Gone are the days when businesses thrive by developing products, push these into markets and simply return results. Increasing levels of customisation mean that businesses need to tap into this customer / user trend and deliver meaningful value.

The volume of data being generated by customers and business processes is growing exponentially, this is valuable data which contains useful insights. Michael Porter outlined in his seminal work Competitive Advantage that primary advantage is gained from either cost or product differentiation.

What if we added data insight as a third factor?

This means that seemingly meaningless data is mined and the findings built into the business process. In common practice this means looking at data in unusual ways, using tools not commonly brought into strategic discussions. One such tool is Geospatial Technology.

Geospatial aka “mapping” platforms provide the strategist the opportunity to view data in new ways. The ability to overlay data such as traffic flow, demographic information, disposable income levels, etc, opens a window to generate insights previously invisible. Data which has or shows potential to have a geospatial element can be viewed and manipulated using a geospatial modelling platform such as MapInfo Professional.

The team at Spatial Insights are able to scope any data available which has been generated by value producing processes and assess potential for real insight opportunities. If you have good data, we’ll model it and generate insights. By good data, we mean any data which possesses geospatial or geographic elements.

If you think there is something missing in your decision making and you need a new perspective, give the Spatial Insights team a call.

The Art of Geocoding

At Spatial Insights we talk a lot about data, and the accuracy of data.  And the sources of data.  And of course, the accuracy of the sources of data.  The lower the integrity of the data, the higher the margin of error, and the lower the chances that any insights derived are valid and authentic.

The chosen method of data collection is a critical tool in the armoury of good data quality.  And the data collected, specifically the written description of the physical street address, which more often than not is captured by employees with lower literacy levels, forms the basis of any Spatial Analysis. 

In order to gain any geographical insight, data needs to be geocoded.  This places each record’s location on the map as per the physical street address of the record, in the form of latitude and longitude. 

Remember, garbage in, garbage out.

Mapmarker, a stand alone geocoding tool, automates the geocoding process, and an accuracy hit rate is generated, which provides confidence levels of data accuracy. 

julia@spatialinsights.co.za