The Wall Street Journal just ran a story on how states are using specialized tools to drill for and find megamillions. But the story’s not on oil and gas drilling. It’s about state revenue and tax departments who are drilling deep into their infrastructure reservoirs for detailed data – across many rich subterranean sources. They’re becoming masters of tapping into veins of data that they can convert to cash – with Teradata databases and tools. States mentioned in the article are Oklahoma and Ohio, however several others have hit some big revenue geysers. They’re excited about it, and have some very happy finance and information executives.

Not all of the state testimonials made it into the final WSJ article. The State of Texas has been drilling with Teradata for years and has uncovered and collected more than $900 million in unreported and under-reported tax revenue. The State of Missouri began a few years ago and it has collected more than $90 million.

The State of Maryland just joined this group of innovative governments and is now implementing a Teradata enterprise data warehouse system and tools to mine data for tax revenue. All told, our state agencies using Teradata systems to drill data have recovered over $1.3 billion.

We at Teradata have bet our business on the premise that the solution to almost every economic problem that organizations experience can be resolved by using our powerful, real-time analytic database to explore and exploit their own dynamic reservoirs and click streams of detailed data for actionable, money-making information.

We congratulate these resourceful and innovative state agencies for following the lead of many global commercial organizations in finance, telecommunications, and retail that have discovered that drilling into detailed data with Teradata database systems can send 100-foot fountains of profitable revenue up into the air -- and spray it all over their businesses, year after year.

Darryl

I was listening to NPR’s Talk of the Nation a few weeks ago and heard a fascinating discussion with Eric Dezenhall, a crisis management expert, about how companies can successfully navigate crises that threaten their public image (Feb. 4, 2010).

Dezenhall made an excellent point about the position in which organizations find themselves when something goes wrong. He said that the first order of business – and the greatest challenge – is determining how widespread a problem is. Does it affect a single store or an entire region? Is there one unhappy customer or are there hundreds of them? Does the problem affect a single component or an entire product line? And where in the supply chain or manufacturing process did the problem occur?

Without quick, clear answers to these questions, companies have to guess at how best to respond, and sometimes, they guess wrong and never recover. These days, businesses can’t afford to guess; they have to know.

That’s where “location intelligence” comes in. The context of geospatial data, itself, is nothing new, nor is the idea that this data holds tremendous potential. What is new is that business intelligence technology has finally advanced to the point where geographic-oriented data that already exists in organizations can be effectively accessed, analyzed and acted upon.

I believe without a doubt that location intelligence is the answer to the challenge Dezenhall described and to some of the greatest challenges that businesses face today. An organization that actively studies geospatial data in the context of its business interests is well positioned to answer the questions he posed, not just in response to a public crisis but perhaps to prevent the crisis from ever happening in the first place.

Moving forward, I don’t think companies will have the option of choosing whether or not to embark on a location intelligence initiative. Either they will jump in and start seeing results, or they will stand back and watch others pass them by.

Michael Gonzales, managing partner of DSS42 LLC, an industry research company specializing in strategy and architecture, was quoted in the Q1 issue of Teradata Magazine as saying, “If you’re not at least at the start of a spatial perspective in your data warehouse, then you’re behind. In the next two to three years, it will be difficult to remain competitive without some spatial perspective.”

Time—and competitors—wait for no one. So go ahead and check out that article to start exploring how location intelligence can transform your business.

Darryl