Recently there have been a deluge of articles and speeches about how to leverage BI and your information assets to maintain/increase revenues and also growth the company now or in the neat future. As the economic downturn has led us all to be much more conservative, there seems to be a quadrant of leadership organizations that are investing in consolidations and re-architecting of their analytical environments. This group of companies, many of which I have visited with, heard on webinars, or witnessed through various other communications channels are defining methods of cost savings while also increasing opportunity.
There seems to be three major themes that are emerging in this effort to reduce cost and increase revenue opportunities:
1) Focus on the elimination of redundancy of data files, work actions, processes, approvals, and also direct cost expenditures that provide no value to the company. Throughout the years many firms have been building separated data bases, data warehouses, and analytical files which cost large sums of financial resources (in comparison to the value achieved) from redundant or replicated infrastructure or work actions. Examine your uses (or non-uses) of data and databases. You will find gigantic opportunities to utilize known valuable data and also to merge them into an integrated data warehouse that fortunately is much more manageable and much lower cost than in distributed environments.
2) Seek ways to interact and engage customers beyond the normal actions or channels and coordinate these efforts. Synchronization of current and usable information, discovery of unknown facts and issues, and alignment with customer management processes will provide a surge in revenues and resells which will ignite the profitability opportunities. There is no revenue without customer(s) and no profit without creating a wedge between expenses and revenues.
Profitable companies know that analytics provide much more than simplified or even complex graphical reporting. Reporting is looking backwards and not utilizing data to provide management with decision-making capabilities. Find ways to ignite management’s thinking by including risk and returns in the reporting or analytic forecasting. This method of using Business Intelligence (BI) provide alternatives for making the right decisions and then re-evaluating the actions taken (and deciding to set new or updated rules-based equations into your BI or decision processes).
3) Achieve higher levels of management support for making smart decisions inside your company and new methods of utilizing customer or supply data to drive down costs and drive up revenues. Plan to automate customer marketing in a high percentage of offers and known repetitive processes. Discontinue management reports that are not reviewed or not even requested anymore. Maybe a quarter review of the most expensive and the least used reports and models should be accomplished with the business users. Using BI should be a Critical Success Factor in all processes. Align the reporting, forecasting and operational BI communications into the decision actions of management. Gain support of CXO’s by directly aiming your deliverables towards THEIR KPI’s or Metrics. Understand THEIR goals and success criteria and utilize analytics and the Data Warehouse to drive information to support them.
There are hundreds of ways to provide information to people to make decisions, take actions, evaluate results, redefine objectives or goals, and to improve their business processes. Plotting out a short and longer term roadmap or deliverables plan for inclusion of advanced BI techniques, dashboards with actionable data, and alternatives to make decisions upon…will drive success for you and the entire company. This is an optimum time and a real opportunity for your firm to ‘raise its intelligence’. Don’t wait for some economic resurgence to overwhelm you with requests. Perform the right actions now, not when a deluge of people will need your support and you will struggle to provide it. Being ahead of the game is half the battle. The other half is using your already satisfied customers to communicate your value to the organization.
