Business Intelligence tools have been able to slice and dice our data for years. But, management teams are reaching deeper into the data, beyond the basics of how good or how bad sales (or quality, or...) are and they are seeking an understanding of where and why. Recent tech giant discussions estimate that 90% of data has a spatial component to it.

Of course, this is where we need to plug in Geographic Information Systems (GIS). More specifically, we need maps that can pull data from our databases and present the data in a manner that is easy to interpret while still supporting the drill down capability that we are familiar with. It turns out that the GIS is the database as all the major database vendors now include the capability to manage spatial content in the data tables. All we need to do now is teach everyone how to write spatial queries....