SMART Infrastructure Dashboard: A Fusion between Business Intelligence and Geographic Information Systems

Business Intelligence (BI) has popularly been adopted as a process that enables easy access, analysis and visualization of information through specialized set of tools for informed decision making. Two most noticeable characteristics of traditional BI is that it (a) is largely used in single-organization environments and (b) uses predominantly aspatial data. We believe that BI has applications beyond single-organization environments, but it very much requires integration of geospatial capabilities given the increasing availability of large volumes of spatial data and a growing interest to see things spatial. The SMART Infrastructure Dashboard (SID), our innovative solution that fuses BI and Geographic Information Systems (GIS), fills this significant gap. In this study, we demonstrate how SID can be used to perform spatio-temporal analysis and visualization of diverse sets of data to uncover complex interrelationships among utility usage, demographics and weather patterns at local and regional scale.