Case management is where policy is applied to real situations. Case management deals with real incidents, real questions, real applications, real risk, and real decisions. Yet most systems ignore a critical consideration: Every case is grounded in place.
From environmental regulation and conservation to public safety, planning, and social services; cases are inseparable from place. Impacts are spatial. Risk is unevenly distributed across location. Outcomes and decisions are shaped by geography, proximity, and local considerations. And yet, in most systems, location is treated as little more than a descriptive field, a reference point rather than a decision driver.
At Informed, we met the same challenge repeatedly across a wide range of clients and sectors: organisations knew that where something was happening mattered, but their case management systems could not act on that knowledge or use current and historic geospatial data to improve future decisions.
The Core Challenge: Case Management Without Spatial Intelligence
When geospatial insight is missing from case management, the consequences are immediate and structural. Teams can struggle to build a shared understanding of where activity is occurring, how cases relate to one another, and how assets, sites, or events interact across a region. Situational awareness becomes fragmented, dependent on individual expertise and manual interpretation. Without geospatial insight, decisions can become inconsistent, affecting stakeholder confidence and organisational reputation.
This problem is amplified by fragmented data. All too often, case records sit in one system and mapping and spatial intelligence live elsewhere. Supporting evidence is scattered across documents, spreadsheets, and emails. Valuable time is lost finding, collating and reconciling information rather than making decisions. Spatial analysis, if it happens at all, is performed outside the core workflow; not designed-in to add value to triage, prioritisation, early intervention and decision making.
As a result, patterns stay hidden. Hotspots go unnoticed. Critical interdependencies between cases go unrecognised. Risks that could have been found early only surface once they escalate. Decisions become slower, less consistent, and harder to defend.
This is not a failure of people or process. It is a failure of systems that have not been designed to include a consideration of place.
Why “Adding a Map” Is Not Enough
Many organisations try to close this gap by adding mapping tools alongside their case systems, or as ‘bolt-on’ customisations. While visualisation provides value, it does not address the underlying problem.
Maps show where something is. They do not explain why it matters, how it relates to previous cases and decision, or what should be considered when taking next steps.
True geospatial capability requires spatial intelligence to be embedded directly into all tiers of case management: from the underlying data model, through business logic, integration, workflow and user interfaces. Without that integration, maps stay peripheral: consulted after decisions rather than shaping them as they are made.
Recognising this limitation was a turning point and why our product team at Informed has been hard at work innovating to fill this gap.
Creating Geospatially-enabled Case Management
In response to this challenge, Informed Solutions deliberately set out to create something wholly new for the marketplace: an end-to-end, spatial-by-design case management capability,
Within our InformedDECISION™ platform, we designed and delivered a dedicated Geospatial Case Management capability – not as an add-on or visual overlay, but as a core decision capability. The intent was explicit: to make place a first-class dimension of case management, alongside people, organisations, time and risk.
This capability connects cases directly with geospatial, operational, and reference datasets. It puts spatial analytics at the heart of case workflows, enabling decision-makers to see patterns as they form, understand spatial relationships between cases, and assess risk in context, not retrospectively.
Critically, it supports interactive dashboards, spatial analysis, trend detection, and predictive insight that are directly tied to live cases. Decisions are no longer abstracted from the real world; they are grounded in it.
Deployment at NatureScot: A Scottish Context
This innovation is not theoretical. It is deployed in practice with NatureScot, the body responsible for protecting Scotland protected areas and complex environmental and regulatory landscape. It is underpinning the transformation of NatureScot’s approach to managing planning and development applications for protected areas.
NatureScot’s work is inherently spatial, considering protected areas, habitats, species, sites, and landscapes subject to cumulative pressures and long-term change. Traditional case management approaches struggled to support decisions where spatial relationships, regional variation, and historical context were critical.
Through InformedDECISION™, NatureScot adopted a geospatially-enabled case management approach that allows cases to be managed, analysed, and prioritised in their full geographic context. Spatial insights are embedded in how cases are triaged, how evidence is assessed, and how emerging patterns are found across landscapes and time to ensure consistent and transparent decision making.
This was not about replacing GIS expertise. It was about making spatial intelligence accessible, actionable, and integral to everyday decision-making, directly within the case management process.
The results NaturesScot has seen have been transformative. 25% of applications now do not require consultation, reducing unnecessary workload. They have seen a 50% reduction in time taken to triage cases. And, core elements of evaluating and responding to SSSI consents cases now take as much as 85% less time.
From Reactive Processing to Proactive Insight
By embedding geospatial analytics, machine learning, and case intelligence into a single decision platform, InformedDECISION™ enables organisations to move from reactive case processing to proactive, insight-led management.
Patterns that once needed ad-hoc manual analysis become visible automatically. Hotspots and outliers surface early. Risks can be anticipated rather than discovered after the fact. And decisions become more consistent and explainable because the spatial factors influencing them are explicit, not implied.
This capability is especially powerful in multi-team and multi-agency environments, where shared situational awareness is essential and decisions must stand up to long-term scrutiny.
A Broader Opportunity Across Sectors
While NatureScot gives a compelling example, the opportunity for geospatially enabled case management extends far beyond environmental regulation. Any sector dealing with location-based risk, impact, or service delivery stands to benefit, from public safety and infrastructure management to logistics, health, social care, planning, and compliance.
The common thread is simple: when organisations understand where things are happening, they can make better decisions about what to do next.
Organisations That Cannot See Where Things Are Happening Cannot Reliably Decide What To Do Next
Geospatial capability is no longer a specialist function or a reporting afterthought. It is a foundational requirement for modern case management.
By creating and deploying a standalone geospatially-enabled case management module within InformedDECISION™, Informed Solutions has addressed a long-standing gap between digital decision systems and the physical world they govern, enabling decisions that are faster, more consistent, and grounded in real-world context.