Putting Your Business on the Map

Now more than ever, geography is destiny. New software lets you map everything from demographic trends to choice store locations

A satellite orbits the earth at four miles a second, outfitted with digital cameras so sharp that they can pick out individual towels on a beach. It overflies the designated area a number of times, looking straight down on one pass, forward on the next, backward on the third. The angling produces a third dimension, a height that can be analyzed through special 3-D glasses. The sequences of images beamed back will be processed into high-resolution maps, archiving the spatial coordinates of entire cities and plotting topography with mind-boggling precision.

If that sounds like something out of a spy thriller you would read on one of those beach towels, guess again. That satellite-imaging system isn't the CIA's latest surveillance device; it's just one example of how space-age technology is putting an entirely new spin on the marketing efforts of growing businesses.

Popularly portrayed as the stuff of espionage and rocket science, geographic information systems (GISs) have come down to earth. The new generation of GIS software is designed and packaged for the desktop, with applications that allow growing companies to use fantastically detailed geographic databases in virtually every facet of their operations. From real estate firms that take their clients on virtual tours of available properties, to retail chains that pinpoint prime spots for new outlets, to direct-mail houses that fine-tune their promotional campaigns with "geocoded" demographics, to manufacturers that track the distribution of inventory and the pattern of sales, today's GIS products are giving smaller businesses access to powerful tools that until recently were restricted to the mainframes of major corporations.

The commercial applications for GIS technology were first explored in the early 1960s. Back then, mainframe computers were used to identify arable soil and predict crop yields. For any given land mass, various densities of Xs and Os on transparent plastic overlays indicated the topography. A quaint relic of the predigital age, to be sure. But even as PC technology started to revolutionize business and industry in the 1980s, research and development of practical and affordable GIS software lagged behind. Few businesses had an inkling of how to use "spatially referenced data." And if they did, the costs of maintaining complex databases were well beyond the reach of most budgets. Until just a few years ago, GIS setups were customized applications that could cost more than $100,000 to install.

How quickly things change. Today business-oriented GIS product development is a rapidly growing industry, expected to reach $3.8 billion in sales by 1999, turning out low-cost, off-the-shelf PC programs that are as powerful as the mainframe applications of a decade ago. Almost overnight, GISs have become a crowded field, abounding with entrepreneurial enterprises like Space Imaging, which will be marketing high-resolution photographs -- thanks to 3-D technology -- for around $100 a square mile, or Geospan, a vendor of visual data gathered by satellite. Entrenched high-tech companies are jumping in as well. Any notions that GISs might prove a fad were laid to rest last year when Microsoft Corp. added a GIS function to Excel, the world's most popular spreadsheet program.

What's driving the boom in the new GIS trade? On the most basic level, good business sense. Experts say that most of the business information keyed into conventional database fields has something to do with place -- store locations, sales territories, inventory sites, clients' addresses. A GIS program enables a business to enter all of those data as a point or an area on a map -- with a degree of descriptiveness that far exceeds the natural capacity of conventional alphanumerics. Even more significant, GISs make it possible to integrate those data into meaningful patterns and profiles.

Think of a GIS as a series of computer-generated "acetates," clear plastic sheets, each showing different data drawn from the same area, layered on top of one another to reveal associations that can't be seen in a column of numbers or a list of addresses. The more information plugged into a database -- customers' buying patterns, say, or residential property values -- the more multi-dimensional and detailed those graphic associations. With a GIS, a company's PC turns into a powerful business tool, capable of depicting data in ways that make bar graphs and pie charts look downright primitive.

For John Antenucci, a GIS management consultant and founder of PlanGraphics Inc., in Frankfort, Ky., GISs represent the new frontier of what he calls "economic intelligence." "High-resolution satellite imagery is going to change my business," he predicts, and offers the following scenario: "Say I'm a dealer in coal, and I know there's a coal strike coming. I'll be able to assess the coal inventories that utilities in the country have stockpiled because I can look at pictures to see how big the piles are."

For many companies, however, "economic intelligence" simply means a clearer picture of what their own business looks like when plotted with sophisticated geographic variables. Take the case of Raymond V. Walsh, founder of Market Results Inc., a six-person business-to-business market-management firm in Burlington, Vt., who stumbled on the benefits of GISs back in 1994. "All we wanted to do was learn about our clients' geographic distribution," Walsh recalls. "And the quickest way to do that seemed to be to map the database. Like graphs of financials, we figured the pictures might show us something extra." Walsh wound up springing for $30 for a superannuated version of MapLinx Corp.'s MapLinx for Windows that he had seen in a surplus-software catalog. The program converted information in the zip-code fields of conventional records into latitude-longitude locations -- a process called "geocoding" -- and placed them in approximate position on crude maps.