Survey Shows Businesses View Location Intelligence as Critical to Success

Location intelligence will rise in importance over next three years as organizations realize the full potential and emerging applications of the technology

CARTO announced the findings of its “State of Location Intelligence” survey, which polled more than 200 respondents at midsize to large enterprises about their current and future plans to implement location intelligence. The study found that while the knowledge and collection of location data is widespread across organizations, many face challenges to analyzing this data and have a perception gap of how mature their location intelligence is.

CARTO partnered with Hanover Research, a leading market research firm, to conduct this survey.

In order to qualify for the survey, respondents had to be C-level Executives, Managers, or Analysts at organizations with at least 500 employees. The following job titles made up the participants:

• C-Suite: CEO, COO, CTO, CIO, CDO

• Managers: Head/Manager of Business Analysis/Business Intelligence Analysis, Data Science/Data Analysis/Data Engineering, or Geographic Information System Analysis

• Analysts: Business Analyst/Business Intelligence Analyst, Data Scientist/Data Analyst/Data Engineer, or Geographic Information System Analysts

After control measures to ensure accuracy and quality of the survey response data, a total of 220 respondents were included in the final sample.

“We’re encouraged by the work we do every day with forward-looking organizations using location intelligence to truly make a change, not only in their business, but in society,” says Javier de la Torre, CEO and co-founder of CARTO. “It’s evident that more organizations are seeing the value of location data and the benefits possible from incorporating location intelligence insights into business decisions. With the right resources and mindset, we see the potential for smarter business models, more personal experiences, better access to resources and general improvements to our work and personal lives.”

According to the study, 94 percent of organizations knowingly collect data with a location component, and 84 percent of C-level respondents are planning to invest in location intelligence in the next three years. Executives also believe that location intelligence will grow in importance to their organizations over the next few years, with 68 percent of respondents saying it is “very” or “extremely” important today and 85 percent reporting that would be the case in the next three years.

However, the study found that only 17 percent of analysts say their business performs spatial analysis on their location data, while 39 percent of C-level executives believe this is the case. Additionally, many businesses are hindered from diving to a deeper level through their location data analysis, with 42 percent still relying on traditional business intelligence tools to analyze their location data. In fact, the most popular software for analyzing location data was Microsoft Excel (54 percent), indicating many companies don’t support spatial data science methods and techniques.

The survey also found that businesses collecting and analyzing location data will need to overcome some difficult challenges to successfully adopt location intelligence, particularly data quality and accessibility. Nearly half of respondents (49 percent) said “ensuring data quality and accuracy” is a top challenge. Analysts were reported less aware about the various possible methods to collect this data and related challenges, like extracting data in a useable way, and storing and securing data. However, analysts were more aware of challenges like ensuring data quality and accuracy and gathering data in real time.

Other key findings include:

  • The top challenges of location intelligence data analysis were extracting, cleaning and transforming the data into a workable format (41 percent); ensuring sufficient data is available for actionable insights (38 percent); and making sense of the data (37 percent).
  • Only 27 percent said they use custom geography and 17 percent use block groups, indicating most businesses collect location intelligence data with less detail.
  • An overwhelming number of respondents that were extremely familiar with location intelligence said artificial intelligence, machine learning and the internet of things were either very important (44 percent) or extremely important (49 percent).
  • The availability of location data across departments varied widely, with 52 percent saying it was either “very accessible” or “extremely accessible,” while 30 percent reported it was “somewhat accessible” and 16 percent said it was “not at all accessible.”

A full copy of the “State of Location Intelligence” survey is available for download here.