There has been very significant progress in the last 10 years or so in designing and producing user friendly GIS oriented software with huge amounts of diverse data directly accessible to marketing and business users. Five years ago the most powerful of such systems were “Compass” by Claritas, “Infomark” by Equifax - National Decision Systems and “Conquest” by Donnelly Marketing (all of the U.S.) and “Mosaic Systems” by CCN Marketing (Nottingham, U.K.). In addition, at that time, thousands of businesses of all kinds used one of the following less expensive (and less integrated) GIS software packages. MapInfo, Atlas GIS, Tactician, Transcad, SPANS, Maptitude, SCAN US and several other small shape packages
The first mentioned 4 integrated packages made geographical analysis and mapping very close to “push-button” and were designed for relatively unsophisticated and non-quantitative users like marketing managers and real estate researchers. On the other hand, the various general-purpose GIS desktop systems were viewed as ‘lower end’ hands-on type of systems – demanding an in-house analyst (typically a geographer) – by the business community. Data had to be purchased separately and often took a long time to get set up for easy use by the software. In general, however, the standard GIS packages were very slow especially on larger (national and state scale) data intensive applications.
Up to about 5 years ago both the integrated geodemographic/GIS packages and the general purpose desktop mapping software systems were used to provide answers to very simple questions and the methodology was almost always very simple. Some typical applications follow:
1. Geocode customer addresses
2. Map customers in a market as dots
3. Map customers, or customer dollars, over household penetration as
small area choropleth maps
4. Create circular trade area around a store and extract absolute and
relative profiles of the people and households who live there
5. Create a geodemographic profile of customers based on weighted census
variables or membership in geodemographic clusters
6. Create choropleth maps of all the block groups in a market based
on extent of matching to the profile in 5
Most of these tasks barely qualify as analysis let alone geographical analysis.
How have things changed in terms of business users objectives, tools and analysis in 1998. Regrettably, very little in terms of analysis.
First the desktop GIS software field has narrowed considerably. A new entrant ArcView from ESRI quickly gained substantial market share. Now MapInfo and ArcView likely have 90-95% of the business market for desktop GIS software, outside of the higher end market for the integrated type of geodemographic/GIS systems (referred to above). Several of the other software packages have virtually disappeared from businesses – AtlasGIS and SPANS – as the GIS software industry consolidates. The other small share packages have lost share. There is now less choice in low-end desktop software. The top dominant packages have added very little new functionality especially in terms of analysis.
There has been a very significant restructuring in the American geodemographics and business GIS industry. First Strategic Mapping bought Donnelly Marketing and discontinued Conquest. Then ESRI bought Strategic Mapping, kept the Atlas software line and sold the data business to Claritas. More recently, last year, Claritas bought Equifax-NDS, its long time arch rival. It is very likely that Claritas will discontinue the Infomark geodemographic data and software package. Claritas has reworked its Compass product with a MapInfo-based GIS engine and given it a new name.
There has clearly been a substantial reduction in competition and in choice for users in this industry in the U.S. The general philosophy of the few big remaining players is to try to focus even more on the off-the-shelf mass market and add only very simple (but usually sexy) new functionality for business users. The number of buttons in the software has increased but the sophistication has not.
There are likely two exceptions to this general trend and both involve vertical applications. Lower end sales territory optimization and truck/bus routing applications have become more sophisticated. Both these applications now permit some interesting analyses at a reasonable price. But, perhaps the highest demand applications-relating to retail site evaluation and sales forecasting – continue to be overly simplistic – or even crude when evaluated by the standards of spatial analysis. A few specialized consulting firms offer services to build spatial interaction models market by market for interested financial institutions (especially banks) and large retailers, but in general these approaches are viewed as too expensive and perhaps “over-kill”.
It is very clear that the software and data vendors of this industry view most business GIS users as:
1. Extremely price sensitive
2. Rather unsophisticated (“keep it simple, stupid”)
3. Quite non-analytical
4. Wanting simple answers quickly without much concern for the quality
of the numbers
5. Still titillated by colour graphics and maps
6. Unwilling to become involved in new R&D processes
There is a good chance that the software designers and data vendors are right.
I have been involved in putting forward many research proposals to major North American firms to build high quality GIS-based systems for their distinctive business problems. It is a very hard sell. In general, business users really do want to keep things simple and avoid esoteric methodological issues.
I have mixed views of how things could trend in the future. I think
that it is possible for a group of exciting and competent geographers to
get at least some business users excited about doing things right or more
rigorously. However, with the number of charlatans around praying on the
business people who just want a number quickly, and with the general price
sensitivity of businesses, I think it is really unlikely to happen.
On the other hand things could be worse - with simpler software and even
cruder “analysis tools”. Business users could demand even lower priced
and quicker ‘answers’ to their questions.
There has been some calls in papers in the trade journals for this
type of “progress”.
For those of us who are delighted to become involved in genuine spatial
analysis to derive the highest quality research for our business and related
clients the remarks above have the following implications:
1. High-end spatial analysis research for the business community (with
a few exceptions) is done by dedicated researchers without the full knowledge
and support of the clients – since they are not being paid for all they
are doing for the client.
2. Clients never seem to pay full price for this high end research
– much of the real quality analysis is thrown in gratuitously.
3. Most of the analysis work is done in software outside of GIS proper–
either in statistical packages or in database packages of in 3 or 4 GL
programming languages.
4. The work that is done in GIS is high end GIS functionality
and this seems inevitably to be done (until lately) in ArcInfo.
5. Much time is spend moving data between the various software packages
that seem to be best for different purposes
6. After great analyses are completed, analysts have to spend often
more time than the analyses took on figuring out how to present the methods
and findings as “essentially simple”, to please the executives who write
the cheques..
I believe that there are few forces capable of intervening in this state of affairs which will effectively promote higher quality analyses and models to businesses at least on a scale that is large enough to make a really noticeable dint.
Final Remarks .
I have asked a number of my colleagues at Compusearch, in academia,
and in industry to make some comments on this draft and to try to
prove my apparent cynicism wrong.
I suspect that I will receive some good feedback from this document
and would be happy to update this paper with new views in the near future.