As mentioned at the very beginning of the documentation, the vision of CleverMaps is to continuously deliver valuable information backed by geospatial data to make informed decisions. We believe our platform is the ideal tool to reach that and that it brings you closer to using data (internal or external) to your advantage and allows you to build various data products for a wide audience. In this article we are going to explain the advantages of using Location Intelligence as a Data Product and give a few reasons why your business should be adopting it as a standard.
What does the concept bring and why you should care?
A few years ago, companies may not have fully realized the potential lying in the data about their sales, competitors etc., but nowadays more of them are pushing their data teams to reuse the data and build some kind of data products of it. Data product can shortly be described as “a product that facilitates an end goal through the use of data” (DJ Patil, former United States Chief Data Scientist, Data Jujitsu: The Art of Turning Data into Product, 2012). Such data product can be for example a company dashboard visualising the main KPIs of your business or a list of recommended restaurants nearby.
It is well established that when treating data as a usable product companies are able to identify and reduce risks, make a better estimate of the future revenues or measure the performance metrics of each department more accurately. To become a data driven company is a long term effort that brings undeniable benefits, but requires a continuos delivery of up-to-date data, so that executives can find answers to their questions on their own in an easy to understand way. The old approach when employees had to submit each of their questions to the data team and then wait for their answer suddenly becomes ineffective and obsolete. This paradigm change should lead to easier communication inside the company and saving resources for everyone. Data teams should then be providing support to their data products consumers and of course, deliver new features based on the demands coming from the members of their team.
How is CleverMaps helping to build a usable data product?
The whole thought behind the data product concept originates from a regular software development. It applies the same principles, such as agile development, quality control, documentation, user training etc. And similarly to a software, when your data team starts building a data product, you are not aiming to use it just once, you are trying to build something that will continuosly be giving you an edge over your competitors. Such data product should be:
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Reusable - allowing to repeatedly solve as many business problems as possible.
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Beneficial - being built based on the company’s business demands, it should contribute to making a business more efficient.
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Easy to find - when coming across a business problem, a data product offering the answer should be easy to locate.
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Accessible - similarly to the previous point, when the data product is found, it needs to be easily accessible. Nobody wants to wait for a data engineer to first let him in.
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Safe - The data product might contain sensitive data, so you want to be sure that it doesn’t get to anyone who is unauthorized to see it.
At CleverMaps we are aiming to provide our customers with a platform, that can be used by a data team to create a data product fullfiling all of these points and more. We believe in a concept of so called self-service analytics, where we are providing the neccessary technology and support but the customer is a full owner of his project and is building it on our platform. Our clients are enabled to visualize their data in a map and gain spatial insights easily without the need to hire a geospatial data expert.
The advantages of choosing CleverMaps as your Location Intelligence tool
One of the keys for a successful deployment of any data product across company is using the right tools to do so. A suitable tool has to allow the data team to automate the processes, reuse them and be able to monitor the outcome and validity. But at the same time, the user interface of this tool needs to be easy enough for a manager with little to no IT skills to use the final data product and find the desired information on his/her own.
What we are hearing a lot from the market is that companies have little to no experience with using spatial data and they have no idea how to start using their data in a map. And that’s where CleverMaps shines, because it provides you with everything you will need for your Location Intelligence project. You can take advantage of the tools to enrich your data with geographical information from our Data Toolkit or just derive the geographical information on your stores using our Python SDK. Editing metrics, building dashboards, putting charts on them, adding filters - all this and much more is possible in CleverMaps without a need for a prior expertise in geodata or GIS.
Start the journey towards data-driven products with CleverMaps
Building data products is a new principle turning your data team from people answering questions of the colleagues to a team listening to requirements and providing a platform for the senior executives to find the answers themselves. And that is exactly what CleverMaps will allow you to do. We believe that the most effective tools are those which can be used by a vast majority of the company and at the same time can be controlled by the employees themselves, not by a third party. With the help of this documentation and tutorials, you will quickly be able to adopt CleverMaps into your company and start gaining valuable insights from your location data. Start building your project with a template or go through the Tutorials to help you get started from the scratch!