How can a company incorporate these steps into its business strategy?
1. Identify a business intelligence champion. This person should understand the need, believe in the promise, and have organizational power and decision-making authority.
2. Demonstrate proof of concept. Pick a small, achievable and visible business intelligence prototype project to undertake. Often it is completed on the side with a small team and the champion prior to unveiling it to appropriate senior management and users.
3. Commit to centralized, anytime, anyplace data. Make sure the data is stored in a manner that allows for real-time, as-needed questioning by appropriate employees anywhere.
4. Spread the business intelligence culture. Work with people, processes and technology to achieve business intelligence success. Demonstrate and promote successes from step No. 2 to build momentum for business intelligence.
5. Obtain resources for larger and more sophisticated projects. Champion the construction of a centralized data warehouse and the usage of more sophisticated analytics tools.
6. Maintain and motivate the culture. Make analytics tools accessible to all, and demonstrate to management and users how to get answers to business questions more quickly and easily. Emphasize the need to keep the warehouse current, and incorporate this into the culture and processes.
How can you involve employees in this process?
You have to identify processes in which employees participate that generate and/or capture important information. Identify which technologies employees have mastered and are comfortable with and, if necessary, retrain employees.
You need to make information-capturing technologies available at the point in the process where information needs to be captured. You also need to show employees how this makes them more efficient and their jobs easier. Convince employees that business intelligence makes their lives better, because this will have employees pushing to stay involved.
How can you use this information to help make future decisions?
One business edict has been that the customer is always right. But business intelligence has shown some companies that 20 percent of their customers account for 80 percent of sales. So clearly, those customers would be more right than others.
In another example, one supermarket carried more than two dozen brands of orange juice until it identified the eight best-selling juices through business intelligence. The store now benefits from increased sales, as well as reduced floor space, which creates room for other products.
And in a third example, Walmart keeps cash register, or point-of-sale, data for more than two years. It combined that information with weather data to learn that Pop Tart sales increased during severe weather events. The store now loads trucks with this and other comfort foods when it sees severe weather approaching a certain area, which increases sales. Clearly, a smart brain can benefit companies in numerous ways.
Charles E. Downing, Ph.D., is the Walmart Professor in Enterprise Technology Innovation in the Department of Operations Management & Information Systems at Northern Illinois University. Reach him at (815) 753-6381 or [email protected].
