Find-the-best-route maps are perhaps the best known example of mapping software, but the recently released MapIt application from ESRI marries GIS and business intelligence, and takes the technology to a new, even more useful level.

Local company Eagle is bringing MapIt to New Zealand users. It says the software allows users to create interactive maps that “tell a story”.

Just launched, the visually stimulating mapping software is being sold through Microsoft partners worldwide. Eagle specialises in both GIS (geographic information systems) and BI software, and is a Microsoft ‘gold’ partner in New Zealand.

Designed to work on Microsoft’s application platform, MapIt displays static spreadsheet data and tables in a much more accessible and dynamic fashion that also allows for user interaction. The retail example ESRI showcases on its website shows just how visual and useful MapIt is at transforming tabular data into a visual form that better reveals patterns and relationships.

The example concerns a number of stores across a city and allows the user to drill down to reveal both the number of customers at each store and the number of purchases made. Demographic information about income, ethnicity, media preferences and even the most popular purchases of people living nearby can then be over-laid or linked to the ‘map’.

In the ESRI example, a business manager is trying to understand why one store in a particular area is under-performing. Local demographic information reveals, among other things, that people in the store’s vicinity prefer the radio to most other media, so any advertising should emphasise radio ads. This is the kind of crucial business insights geographically displayed information linked with pie-chart data can throw up.

Local blog geo.geek.nz likes the application a lot – for a quick and easy look at the variety of MapIt ‘maps’ available, check out the very clear examples at geo-geek.

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9/7/15_ex_h

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