How Companies Use BI To Drive Corporate Performance

Companies can use different strategies to compete on the basis of data, models and prediction.

Large retailers, such as Wal-Mart, mine vast amounts of data for product category analysis.
Harrahs Casinos changed its competitive strategy in the gaming industry from building mega-casinos to analytics around customer loyalty and service.
Online giants Amazon and Yahoo use intense testing and analysis to business changes. Amazon uses detailed empirical analysis to make advertising decisions and how best to use its web page real estate.
Capital One runs more than 30,000 experiments a year to identify and test credit card offers.

Those companies that are using BI to drive corporate performance compete on analytics at the highest level. Their corporate culture is one of fact-based decision making, using analytics in multiple functional areas. The key element that has escalated these companies above their competitors has been the strong buy-in by executives of business intelligence capability throughout the organisation.

Such a substantial changes in culture and behavior must be driven from the top. The CEO establishes the focus, and engage his executive team to drive BI down through the company hierarchy. This ensures that BI maintains a strategic focus.

To build demand for BI starts with simply making the organization aware of the data available, by creating simple dashboards of key performance metrics at operational level. This gets everyone, not just senior executives focused on information and encourages employees at all levels to act on any issues that appear in the data.

Sometimes, the value can be driven up from the bottom. For instance, a marketing manager using software tools to display sales data graphically using an interactive geographical map may generate IT executive interest to expand other geographically oriented analytical capabilities. Using a broader base to demonstrate capability and value to senior executives, this BI initiative was driven from one silo, to the IT foundation and up to the senior levels.

Regardless of how you intend to utilize the power of BI or initiate it within your organisation, the key action point is to start now. BI is going to be one of those industry defining capabilities that will very quickly separate the winners from the losers.

Start now!

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