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F E A T U R E

It's the Information, Stupid

September 30, 2002
By Lori MacVittie

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The Whys and Hows

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	In this article
	Introduction
	Down to the Numbers
	The Whys and Hows
	Executive Summary
	Everybody's Doing It
	Epoll Results

So why should you invest in a BI solution if you aren't certain it will cut costs, avoid risks or enhance customer satisfaction? Evidence to support the products' benefits is available. For example, a restaurant chain uses these tools to measure the impact of its marketing promotions and menu changes and analyze purchases from its major suppliers to negotiate better pricing and track discrepancies on contracted prices. The company estimates that the analysis has resulted in tens of thousands of dollars in yearly savings for each of its 170 restaurants.

If you still aren't certain whether a business-intelligence solution can improve your business, consider the following questions:

• How much data does your business generate? If you've got terabytes of data, it's likely you're missing important relationships and trends in that data. A BI solution can find them and your business analysts can turn them into profit or cost savings.

• Is your data stored in many places? Pulling together data from multiple sources is costly and generally requires dedicated IT staff. A BI solution can alleviate the need for most of this staff. It also helps business analysts generate the data when and how it best suits their needs.

Automated Reporting

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• Can BI tools help you isolate customer segments interested in specific products or services? A BI tool identifies common characteristics of customers that can be useful for several reasons, including targeted marketing campaigns and risk analysis.

To choose the solution that's right for you, consider the mundane issues of platform support, but also consider how your people will use the tool. Do you need mobile access to the tools? Will your users need to perform ad hoc queries on their own? Also consider whether you want to monitor specific types of data (usually financial or inventory-based data), and take advantage of the notification features available in some BI solutions. These tools help keep you informed on the state of your business and ensure you have the most up-to-date information on which to make your daily decisions.

If you have a data warehouse, you may not have to worry about which data sources the solution supports because all critical data is centralized. If you don't have a warehouse, you'll want to consider whether a solution can access data natively from your CRM, HR and legacy systems.

Finally, consider price. For small-to-midsize organizations with a limited numbers of users, consider a package deal or a solution offered with per-user pricing. Larger organizations should purchase only what they need, to keep the costs justifiable.

For our analysis of the tools, see our review.

Technology editor Lori MacVittie has been a software developer and a network administrator. Most recently, she was a member of the technical architecture team for a global transportation and logistics organization. Write to her at lmacvittie@nwc.com.