Open letter to Business Intelligence, Analytics, and Data Science leaders on Geography

I'm writing this to you—BI managers, data scientists, analytics leads, and decision-makers working with data lakes, dashboards, and machine learning pipelines. I’ve been where you are. I spent more than 10 years in the Business Intelligence world, building datamarts, OLAP cubes, ETL processes, reports, and dashboards for executive teams and business departments.

And I still remember, vividly, the day we plugged a simple geographical visualization into one of our tools—Knosys ProClarity, sitting on top of Microsoft SQL Server 7’s OLAP engine. Nothing changed in the data model. But the reaction from our client? It was like we had turned on the lights.

They were blown away by the ability to see their business on a map: regions colored by performance, the ability to drill down into cities and even individual stores or territories. It felt obvious. It felt powerful. It felt like something that should’ve always been there. But it wasn’t.

And honestly? It still isn’t.

The Most Underrated Dimension in Your Analytics Stack

Imagine if your analytics only showed you static snapshots of a KPI—no trend lines, no comparisons over time, no growth analysis. Ridiculous, right? Time is a fundamental dimension in any analysis. We always factor it in.

Now here’s the twist: why isn’t space treated with the same respect?

Where things happen—sales, incidents, engagement, churn—is just as important as when they happen. Yet, geography is still largely absent from most analytics and BI environments.

And no, I don’t mean a static map on a dashboard. I mean geography as a first-class analytical dimension, on par with time, available to any business user—not just the GIS expert.

The Trouble with Traditional GIS

There’s a reason geography is missing in action: GIS tools have traditionally been hard to use. Think ArcGIS, MapInfo, QGIS—amazing tools, but equivalent to Photoshop in complexity. Business users don’t use Photoshop to crop an image; they use tools like Canva. And it’s the same with spatial analytics: until now, there was no Canva.

That’s why, for decades, GIS lived in a technical silo. Business users had to make requests, wait for maps, then try to interpret them. GIS experts, in turn, spent much of their time producing basic thematic maps instead of focusing on high-value spatial modeling and analytics.

The New Era: Geography as a Core Data Experience

But that has changed. Web-based, cloud-native Geospatial Intelligence platforms are removing those barriers.

Now, any business user can:

• Explore and compare KPIs by region, neighborhood, or custom areas

• Combine internal data with external datasets (e.g., demographics, mobility, store locations) using Geography

• Visualize campaigns, sales performance, or operations in space and time

• Make decisions grounded in real spatial patterns—not just bar charts and tables

And your GIS team? Now they can stop producing pie charts on maps and start enabling real geographical decision-making.

Complement, Don’t Replace

This isn’t about replacing your dashboards or data warehouses. It’s about complementing them.

Just as you built time-based analysis workflows, you can now empower users with location-based insights. Not a static, clickable map in a dashboard—but a geography-first interface designed to ask and answer spatial questions.

And there’s more: geography brings your data to life. These geo tools take the numbers and facts you so preciously gather and process and bring them to everyone’s eyes—on a map. Business users will be dazzled to begin with, and then they'll start using it every day. Because the map paradigm is something intrinsic to the human mind. This is not just data analysis. This is data coming to life.

A Challenge and an Invitation

If you’re a data leader, ask yourself:

• What do you answer your 'internal clients' when they ask you for some geospatial data or analysis?

• How easy is it to deploy a geospatial dataset or analytical environment to a user or team?

• Do you have a clear idea of what an organization-wide, enterprise-grade geospatial intelligence system would look like?

• Can your business users access in an easy and autonomous way geographic data and analytics? Can they easily add other internal or external datasets to their analysis?

• Can your analytics stack tell you where things happen, with the same ease it shows when they happen?

• Is your data architecture prepared to deliver spatial intelligence as part of your data services?

One hot stuff about Geospatial Intelligence: geography can join datasets that have no other keys in common. None. No IDs, no time stamps, no customer codes—just location. That’s a super-power, both analytical and ETL-wise. It’s how geography becomes the common ground—literally.

If your stack isn’t ready for this, it’s time to act. Because your competitors might already be doing it.

At Mapidea, we’re helping organizations of all sizes bring geography into the analytics mainstream. Our mission is to democratize location intelligence—turning geography into a shared language across teams, from marketing and sales to operations and strategy.

Please mark my words: The map is no longer a decoration on your dashboard. It's a window into the 'where' of your business, and a great way for your data to shine and be transformed into real value by, theoretically, everyone in your organization. It’s time you opened it.