Download PDF version +

Customer Profile

Geographic-Enterprises (Geo-E) enables its clients and their users to easily understand geography and the economic environment. As a result, Geo-E helps them make better decisions to manage their resources and grow their communities. Said Managing Partner Craig Johnson, “our goal is to bring spatially-oriented information to the business user. The typical GIS applications have been too expensive, and too complicated for far too long.”

Customer Case Description

Geo-E’s client, Decision Data Resources, is an economic development consulting firm who helps organizations understand economic and business data to make better decisions about economic development planning, promoting key industry growth, and evaluating the future of manufacturing bases. To do that effectively, Decision Data Resources (DDR) needed huge amounts of government data (including employment, federal funding, and economic data) easily available to their users for analysis and insight.

Unfortunately, that’s easier said than done. When DDR went to use the many available government data sources, they discovered major inconsistencies and different formats. They faced a daunting task requiring heavy data cleansing, normalization and integration. They also needed a means for easy, fast distribution. So DDR turned to Geo-E and asked them to help solve the problem.

“The challenge for this industry is to have the right data to help make decisions – and not waste time and budget finding it, cleaning it up, and making it useful” acknowledged Johnson.

Figure 1: Answer questions like “How have Department of Agriculture agencies been distributing funds in terms of grants, loans or other reimbursements over the last 3 years?” In this case, the Farm Service Agency has been the largest funder and has favored guaranteed/insurance loans in both Colorado and Washington.

The Solution

Geo-E knew that they could normalize all that data and build an easily distributed application on the web for DDR that ordinary business people could use. But they needed a way of helping users to use and analyze all that data. “We were looking for a way to present visualizations of this data. Because there are so many dimensions to geographic economic data, traditional graphic applications were very challenged” noted Johnson.

“When we discovered Tableau, we knew we could finally present powerful data analytics in a simple and clear way.” So Craig and his team used Tableau Server as a key element of their web-based application. “With Tableau on top of this very large data store we’ve created, we were able to rapidly and easily create visualizations accessible via the web. When people see it, they really like it. They can look at data, they can see patterns, they can ask questions. Data like this has never been this clean or easy to use” continued Johnson.

“Tableau enables our clients and their users to get the info they need to do their analysis. It means they can present their points and make their proposals much more quickly than they could before. For economic developers, that extra time translates literally into more questions answered, more analysis done, more development for their community” noted Johnson.

To see more visualizations from the application Geo-E built for DDR, click on any or all of the Viz numbers below. To learn more about the data, Geo-E's application or DDR's economic analytical consulting, please contact Craig Johnson (303.530.6958) or Kent Hargesheim (919.562.1377) of Geo-E or Chuck Branch (205.871.0353) of DDR.