As with many ventures that cost capital, we need to find the return to the organization. Often Business Intelligence (BI) has softer value, but in Claudia Imhoff‘s presentation at Think Big she shared some great building blocks of which her experience found value.
Some of the benefits she mentioned were (and I add a few of my own):
- Lowered operational cost
- smarter marketing campaigns
- reduced inventory levels
- category management
- understanding cost of customer and why
- Reduced IT workload
- a properly built Business Intelligence environment reduces development and support costs
- move BI into the hands of the business, drop the middle-man out
- Better access to information – self serve, this one is softer as people often have problems quantifying their time costs unless as above we are reducing costs in IT.
- Collective knowledge about the business – by diseminating the information, you can empower people to actions that align with corporate goals
- Increase revenue
- focused marketing offerings in the hands of a user when they are ready to listen – travelocity is a perfect example.
I especially enjoyed her anecdote about asking to see someone’s compensation plan and from there being able to identify the Business Intelligence needed to enhance those performance metrics.
