Business Intelligence Advantages

Customer Intelligence for a Competitive Edge

There are countless surveys out there today that stress the importance of customer retention and loyalty.  Studies prove that high levels of customer satisfaction result in improved brand image through positive word of mouth, as well as increased profitability through greater repeat business.  Additionally, many experts claim that it costs as much as 10 times more to acquire a new client as it does to keep an existing one.

For this reason, customer intelligence has become a critical component of today’s reporting and analysis strategies.

Why is customer intelligence so vital? Because data about clients often resides in various systems, maintained by different departments across an organization.  Sales and marketing teams manage one database, containing information about campaigns and deals in progress.  Data about help desk and service calls likely exists in a completely separate application, maintained by the department that oversees post-sales support.  And, the finance department keeps billing and payment information in a yet another system.

If these systems don’t “talk” to each other, each department acts in a vacuum when dealing with customers, holding conversations and conducting business without being aware of what’s happening across the other crucial touch points.

However, when all customer-related data is properly aligned, companies can:

• Gain complete insight into the customer experience (i.e. what is it like to do business with the organization)
• Better coordinate customer activities, especially those that require cross-department collaboration, throughout the entire organization
• Identify the best and most profitable customers, and develop campaigns and programs to maximize loyalty and retention among them
• Fully understand client needs, wants, and preferences, and use that knowledge to create more impactful and successful marketing messages
• Boost revenues from the existing client base by identifying opportunities to sell additional products and services
• Uncover problems in services delivery, before they negatively impact customer satisfaction

What are some of the best ways to implement customer intelligence across an enterprise?

• Create a centralized repository of all pertinent customer-related information
• Provide fast easy access to that repository to all staff in customer-facing roles via intuitive business intelligence tools
• Set critical customer-related metrics, and measure them continuously
• Use predictive analytics to anticipate customer behaviors based on past actions

Tailoring Your KPIs to Your Business

In recent years, key performance indicators (KPIs) have become critical to accurately gauging the state of a business and effectively measuring operational performance.  Business intelligence tools have provided companies with a great way to measure these vital metrics to ensure that their most important objectives and goals are being met.

Yet, few companies truly understand what KPIs are all about.  True, many BI packages on the market today come complete with pre-defined reports, charts, and graphs for KPI monitoring.  These are usually based on standardized measures that apply to most all businesses in every industry, and are designed to accelerate the development and implementation of comprehensive performance management strategies across an enterprise.

But, when it comes to KPIs, the “one size fits all” approach is not always best.  While standardized KPIs are a good start, they alone are not enough.  Every company is unique in its purpose and mission.  Therefore, each one requires different metrics and performance indicators to determine how well it is achieving its most critical goals.

In addition to standardized performance metrics, companies should create a set of custom-tailored measures that follow the guidelines below:

• Base them on key business drivers.  What is your business really trying to achieve?  Are you trying to boost market share?  Or is profitability and shareholder equity your primary goal?  Perhaps customer retention is most important to you?  Define three to five key business drivers, then identify the business processes that support them.  It is the effectiveness and impact of these activities that your KPIs should be tracking and assessing.
• Make them department-oriented.  What is relevant to one department may not be so crucial to the next.  For example, your sales department will have different goals to achieve then your accounting or customer service teams.  Therefore, each division should have their own set of metrics – that tie directly into the overriding KPIs for the enterprise – to help them determine if they are meeting their plans, and what corrective action, if any, needs to be taken. 
• Set role-based goals. Even within the same department, goals will vary from one employee to the next.  That’s why its important to break larger objectives down into smaller measures, so each worker will know what is expected of them, how well they are doing, and how their role impacts the performance of the department.

In the long run, a performance management strategy won’t work if the KPIs being measured aren’t the right ones.  Be sure to consider company mission, structure, and other unique factors and traits when outlining your plan and defining your performance metrics.

How to Ensure Broad End User Adoption of BI Applications

When an organization deploys a new business intelligence system – whether it’s within a single department or across the enterprise – some are rather surprised when end users don’t immediately embrace it.  Many companies find that users will still keep data in Excel spreadsheets, or manually cut and paste information from various applications to create their own reports.  Or, they often rely on IT staff to generate the needed documents from back-end systems.

But, widespread end user adoption is vital to ensuring information accuracy, timeliness, and consistency across the business, as well as the realization of rapid return on a business intelligence investment.  In fact, lack of user adoption is usually one of the top three reasons cited when a BI implementation fails.

So, how can your company encourage its users to jump on the BI bandwagon?

Get them involved early on.

Ask representatives from all user groups to participate in your BI project from the very beginning.  Involve them in all aspects of the initiative, including requirements definition, solution evaluation, and vendor selection.  This will ensure that the application will best meet their reporting and analysis needs, and make them feel as though they have a vested interest in the solution’s success.

Ease of use is key.

If a business intelligence system is not simple or intuitive, it will not only increase the time and costs associated with training, it will intimidate users and discourage them from making it a part of their day-to-day activities.  On the other hand, the more familiar the interface and the shorter the learning curve, the more likely your users are to immediately begin leveraging the environment.

Make sure it’s flexible.

Your executives want charts and graphs.  Your financial analysts require data in Excel pivot tables. Your sales representatives need to access real-time information via their Blackberry devices while on the road.  Be sure you understand the diverse requirements of all user types, and select a vendor who can deliver the needed functionality to meet them.

Provide continuous training and support. 

The needs of your users, and your BI environment, will continuously change.  Therefore, training should not be a “one-off” process that takes place only when your system is deployed.  Users need ongoing education to address new questions and challenges, as well as emerging needs as they arise.

Additionally, users need to understand more than just how to use the tool and its features.  According to Gartner, it is more important for users to learn how to analyze and use the resulting information.  The leading analyst firm believes that “focusing only on business intelligence tool training can triple the workload of the IT help desk and result in user disillusionment. A user who is trained on the business intelligence tool but does not know how to use it in the context of his or her business intelligence and data warehousing environment will not be able to get the analytical results he or she needs.”

Promote successes. 

Demonstrating tangible value is critical to getting users to leverage the full potential of your new BI system.  Promote successful use of your BI tools throughout your organization, so employees can understand how their peers are applying the technology to their jobs, and what kinds of results they are realizing.

Ask for feedback. 

As your workforce becomes familiar with the new reporting environment, ideas for enhancements are likely to pop up.  Allow users to voice their feedback, and take their suggestions into consideration when planning for upgrades and enhancements to the application.

Web 2.0: How Will It Impact Business Intelligence?

Web 2.0 is an up-and-coming trend in Web design and development, and more and more companies are beginning to embrace it in order to leverage the full potential of the Internet.  Web 2.0 uses communities, hosted services, and other shared Internet resources to facilitate faster and broader information exchange both inside and outside the enterprise.  Through the use of advanced programming frameworks and technologies like Web services, JavaScript, and AJAX, as well as social networking sites and other communication venues, Web 2.0 enables a virtually unlimited range of Internet collaboration capabilities.

Many industry experts see Web 2.0 as the next revolution in business intelligence, and expect it to transform reporting processes in ways that few technologies and methodologies have been able to in the past.  Gone will be the days of information access and analysis that was limited by the constraints of internal data and traditional back-end systems.  Instead, a new era of BI will emerge, one that allows users to supplement internal information with data from a vast array of external sources like blogs, wikis, and RSS feeds.

So, what will be some of the best ways to apply Web 2.0 techniques to BI environments? Web 2.0 will most impact business intelligence via its ability to allow companies to create more rich Internet applications for reporting and analysis.  With Web 2.0-enabled reporting environments, users of any kind – even non-technical users – can access and interact with information with almost no boundaries.

For example: 

• Use of wikis, blogs, and other collaborative workspaces will allow users to instantly publish and share reports and other critical business content. 
• Incorporation of RSS feeds into data marts and warehouses will serve as an additional information source in reports and analyses, providing an endless stream of real-time information.
• Development of BI environments using advanced Internet frameworks will accelerate deployment, improve system performance, enhance robustness of the user interface, increase speed of data delivery, and ease integration with other business applications.
• Combining BI with various external sources – through use of mashups – will expand the depth and breadth of the corporate information that already exists.  Mashups can also be utilized to enable rapid creation of composite BI services. 
• Use of “tagging” techniques will make reporting content available and easy to find over “everyday” Web sites such as Yahoo and Google.  This will facilitate collaboration with customers and external business partners.

With Web 2.0, organizations can improve all facets of their business intelligence environments.  The technical benefits are just the beginning.  Access to, interaction with, and sharing of vast amounts of vital and timely data will be significantly increased, and as a result, the end user experience – and the value that BI can add to the business – will be dramatically enhanced.

Reporting and Analysis for the Mobile Worker

The concept of the “mobile” worker is nothing new.  For decades, sales and service professionals have rarely visited their home bases, and instead devoted the bulk of their time to traveling from one customer site to another.  Additionally, many executives, senior managers, and line of business supervisors are required to spend significant amounts of time on the road and away from the office.

But, regardless of their role, each one of these workers needs to have anytime, anywhere access to the same kinds of up-to-date, mission-critical business information as on-site employees.  Without it, they will be completely disconnected from core business activities and operations – rendering them unable to identify and leverage vital trends and opportunities, or discover and correct problems and issues in a timely fashion when they are away from headquarters.

That’s where mobile business intelligence comes in.

This type of technology, although innovative and cutting-edge, has existed for quite some time.  As the use of mobile devices became well entrenched in day-to-day work activities, many of the leading tools on the market began enhancing their offerings accordingly by incorporating the ability to distribute reports to cell phones, pagers, and handheld devices (such as Blackberrys, Palm Pilots, and Windows Pocket PCs) on a scheduled or event-driven basis.   These features, although a major step in the right direction, solved only a portion of the problem, since off-site staffers had access to only a fraction of the business intelligence functionality they needed.

But, in the past few years, mobile business intelligence solutions have evolved tremendously to give “on the go” employees greater control over how their reporting and analysis needs are satisfied.  Ad hoc queries, monitoring of KPIs and performance metrics, real-time alerts, and even dashboard-style information delivery are now all possible with the implementation and use of advanced mobile BI applications.

If your company maintains a large base of remote employees, or staff members that are frequently away from the office, then mobile BI solutions should be on the top of your priority list.  In fact, an Information Week survey shows that while just 13 percent of companies currently have the technology in place to send BI data to mobile devices, more than one-third plan to implement that capability within the next two years.

But, not all mobile BI applications are created equal.  When evaluating vendors, be sure to look for the following features and functionality:

• A simple and intuitive interface that is similar to the client/server or Web-based version of the solution. 
• Maximum flexibility, so mobile users can access, run, and interact with reports in any way needed. 
• Access to real-time corporate data – not just “canned” or pre-run reports. 
• The ability to work seamlessly with virtually any commonly-used handheld device. 
• Advanced security, to keep confidential corporate information – such as data contained in financial reports – secure from unauthorized access.

BI Competency Centers – Do You REALLY Need One?

For years, industry experts have been praising the benefits of business intelligence competency centers, claiming that they were the only way for organizations to achieve true success with their BI deployments.  BI competency centers are centralized teams, made up of a variety of technical and functional representatives, designed to work with the various user groups and executive teams throughout the organization to:

• Create and implement a long-term reporting and analysis strategy for the entire enterprise
• Ensure that all BI projects support critical missions and goals at both the business unit and corporate level
• Coordinate and integrate siloed, departmental deployments of BI tools
• Define needs and requirements (i.e. skills, technologies, etc.)
• Ensure smooth initial implementation and rollout
• Promote widespread user adoption
• Continuously assess the environment, and optimize accordingly to maximize return on investment

Two years ago, a Gartner research report indicated that as many as 20 percent of companies using business intelligence had established related competency centers, with as many as twice that number planning to create them within 12 months.

Yet, most of these organizations failed to realize the true value that BI competency centers can provide, due to improper planning and execution.  Some businesses simply set up help desks for technical questions, and provided a few end user training courses.  Others were unable to keep the momentum going after the initial rollout was complete, losing sight of the status of the environment, and how it was being used.  As a result, many organizations abandoned their BI competency center initiatives, or chose to move forward with their BI projects without ever even considering one.

So, do companies really need BI competency centers to realize true value from their reporting projects?  The answer is yes.  Business intelligence competency centers, when structured properly, can be highly effective to any enterprise-wide reporting strategy, helping organizations to eliminate overlapping and redundant technologies, reduce administrative burden and related costs, and maximize return on their BI investment.  With a well-organized BI competency center, best practices – including technologies and analysis techniques – can be utilized and shared across all divisions and end user teams.

But, the most successful BI competency centers are about more than just building a team to oversee tool selection and acquisition.  In order to work properly, they must include formalized strategies and procedures for a broad range of related disciplines, including:

• Data governance, including centralization, cleansing, access, and quality management. 
• Solution standardization, to prevent the proliferation of disparate, siloed reporting and analysis tools across various departments. 
• Vendor relationship management, to enable the efficient administration of upgrades, enhancements, licenses, etc. 
• End user support and training to ensure that all types of information consumers can access advice and guidance to help them use existing BI tools to their fullest potential.