The changing business opportunities of modern location intelligence

Community Member Microsoft Employee

Like ( 0 )

Report

What are your memories of business technology in 2010? When it comes to processes and tasks that required location-based information and analysis, the world looked quite different from 2023. Let’s take a closer look at four industry examples of how business decisions were handled in 2010 to help us understand how far business solutions have come in the meantime.

Case A: Geographic business expansion

Consider a business in hospitality that wants to expand to a different country. The ideal way of doing this was visiting the country, analyzing the areas with other hotels, finding tourist destinations, touring important monuments, and checking hospitability demand near them. Some management teams sent their trusted staff members along with local business analysts to recce and decide. Others hired agents in the new country and fed them with requirements, thus, trusting their reports. Both ways involved an additional expenditure of hiring and/or traveling.

Case B: Navigation in emergencies

Even the 5-star rated hospitals in the city relied on roadside navigation and direction boards for the ambulance commute. Routes were figured out on the go, even during emergencies. New blood banks had to be discovered in situations of shortages. The supply chain solutions facilitating the transport of medicines and vaccines were unorganized. The road maps were static, without mechanisms for modification according to the current situation.

Case C: Preparing for natural disasters

Businesses weren’t prepared for the climatic situations. Certain areas that were constantly hit by a hurricane, floods, storms, earthquakes, etc. lacked preventive measures. New businesses unaware of the climatic hazards often ended up investing in such places and suffering major losses as a result.