By Ian Foster
Google Earth, you’ve all seen it, zoomed in on your post-code, marvelled at the technology behind it. You have a talking GPS map in your car to find your way to that elusive customer. Great applications, but don’t you get the feeling that maps could be doing more for our profession?
You have post codes for 99% of your customers, suppliers and shareholders. You know where your property & plant are, maybe even have a location code against your major stock and work in progress items, thinking about having tracking tags in your vehicles. Segmentation is a breeze, all great information, but don’t you get the feeling that even more is possible?
How about generating a map to show, at a glance, where your 90 day debtors are. Or perhaps produce a topography showing peaks of where high sales levels are factored with good payers. Maybe compare that with some kind of demographic topology to identify possible new customers & business locations.
Taking it further, imagine comparing Balance Sheets that don’t have any numbers! A topological Geo-Balance Sheet wouldn’t want too many colours, but how about:
– Light blue peaks for non-current assets;
– Dark blue peaks for current assets;
– Dark red troughs/valleys for current liabilities;
– Lighter red troughs for non-current liabilities;
– Pink troughs for shareholders funds.
Now imagine seeing a time progression of those kind of views, particularly for the current assets and liabilities. Zooming in on specific a specific asset class using more shades of colour & seeing the colours change with the cash cycle over time. The latest mapping software can produce all this, given the right basic inputs. The leverage of having a solid link from powerful financial software into powerful mapping software is vast.
All that’s needed for this is for the tables within the financial software database that are reasonably flat (i.e. that look like a spreadsheet to the less IT literate), become separate real-time attribute tables that the mapping software uses to create additional layers.
->Poster by Ian Foster
At the Global Spatial Data Infrastructure (GSDI) conference, the mapping people talked a lot about interoperability of their mapping software. Software such as ESRI’s ArcGIS and Intergraph’s GeoMedia being able to draw a variety of geographical information from a variety of Geo-Servers to produce useful information.
They’ve developed a range of standard specifications, such as Geographical Mark-up Language (GML), an extension of XML, to make this happen. It should be possible for the financial software people to draw on this & make financial software geo-enabled using the information it already contains, producing real-time layers directly into the mapping software.
Also useful for the mapping people when they’re trying to manage land parcels, which might have multiple transactions (leases, mineral rights and so on) for multiple customers. All those “many-to-many-to-many” complex information relationships might be a bit tricky for the geographers, but are what Accountants have been doing for years.
Meanwhile you can look good by asking your software supplier “Is it geo-enabled?”. If enough of us ask, then maybe it will be.
Ian Foster
BSc FCA is a freelance consultant, who attended the GSDI conference in Chile just after the SoftWorld event in Birmingham. He last appeared in Accountancy in Dec 1990 (p58) when he worked for Ernst and Young. Since then, after a couple of years in UK aerospace, he has worked on institutional strengthening projects in Bhutan, Bangladesh, Guyana and Uganda. The Guyana project was focused on land management and won a bronze medal from the UK’s Management Consultancies Association for Best Management Practice in a Change Management category.
IanFoz@aol.com