While many organisations don't know where to start gathering this information, others know exactly where this information resides - hidden in the company's data and call centre stores and locked in sales and marketing databases and back-end financial systems.
The irony is that while organisations are in possession of this information it's often not usable and companies attempting to use it in this 'tangled' format soon give up, pleading 'data-overload'.
Business Intelligence (BI) gives organisations the ability to unravel the hidden knowledge in this knotted data and deliver actionable insights to the decision makers.
But implementing a strategy is not a simple task of acquiring some software, pointing it at the relevant stores of data and expecting answers to begin rolling out.
In order to achieve success with a BI project a company needs to consider its key business goals and the actions that it needs to take to deliver on these objectives efficiently and effectively. BI provides the bridge between the goals and performance.
With a clear understanding of how BI will underpin the business' delivery goals over the long-term, an organisation must ensure that the supporting data has a high level of relevance and integrity and that it is intimately understood. This will ensure that it will be effectively and efficiently interrogated so as to deliver meaningful insights that can be actioned across the organisation, with the resultant outcomes being tracked and measured over time.
Best practise dictates that we centralise the company's customer data into a single, accessible and useable repository and then analyse it. Sales data should be linked to marketing data and combined with all other data related to customer interaction, including data from back-end financial systems to create a customer centric-view of the customer.
Having built the necessary data repository and ascertained the required insights from the analysis function to support the strategy of the business, the analysis should commence with five simple objectives in mind: who; what; why; when and where.
The 'question' or 'end-goal' could be, for example, to identify: who my ideal customers are after incorporating any hidden costs associated with servicing them. Then I can plan on incentivising customers with these same characteristics to begin doing business with me and encourage my non-ideal customers to move to competitors.
A good first step to this process is to analyse the company's revenue streams and build an ideal client portfolio around each of those revenue streams, taking into consideration the fixed, variable and hidden costs associated with these revenue streams. It is imperative that the entire organisation is involved in this process.
Sales, marketing, manufacturing, procurement, delivery and management input is key to the successful implementation of a BI project and ensures that the results gained from a BI initiative are actionable across the organisation.
When it comes down to it, BI only presents real value to an organisation if the integrity of the underlying data is sound, the data is intimately understood and the organisation is prepared to action the findings. It is only after actioning these findings that the organisation will begin maximising the benefit from attracting and retaining ideal customers, reducing costs and ultimately becoming more profitable.
