Harnessing the Power of Business Intelligence

Being able to compare cost or revenue per employee to the ratios of competitors is another benefit of new data analysis. By comparing your company’s ratio to that of your nearest competitor, you can better see where you’re coming out, says deVera. “You could also be a small company and compare yourself to General Electric, if you’re in the same industry. Even if they’re bigger, you can see their ratios and yours and it’s an apples-to-apples comparison.”

One company has even dedicated itself to turning BI technology outward and mining the public Web for just such valuable content. “There is a lot of garbage out there, that’s for sure, but there is so much gold out there that you never had access to, as a company. Now is the time to pay attention to that data outside the firewall, as it relates to your business,” says Keith Cooper, CEO of Connotate. He recently worked with a large brand-name hotel that was getting negative feedback from guests, saying the rooms in its brand-new wing were too noisy. Management had determined that they would have to spend several million dollars to soundproof the walls and ceilings of the entire wing. Connotate mined the web for all reviews and customer comments from dozens of review sites, presented by topic and date. “In the next 60 days, they discovered that several guests had figured out the problem for them. The doors to the rooms were missing the rubber bottoms that keep out noise and light. The $5-per-room solution was all that was needed.”

On the revenue side, CEOs can use BI analysis to spot new opportunities that would require minimal capital investment to realize. “It takes [bits of] information that are typically scattered around the company and brings them together to reveal opportunities,” explains Wayne Simmons, CEO of The Growth Strategy Company. Simmons worked with a high-tech client that discovered a new niche in an emerging market for a legacy product they’d had for years but that had leveled off sales in the U.S. “They were able to connect the product portfolio with the market analysis, so they had a finished product they could get to market very quickly.”

Another client, a consumer-product company, had the goal of globalizing as quickly as possible. Their primary metric for evaluating new market opportunities was GDP; high-growth countries were first priority to penetrate, and India was at the top of that list. But when they drilled down to look at other variables, such as market access, political dynamics and regulatory environment, “that painted a very different picture,” says Simmons. “The highest growth markets were the most expensive to go into and operate in. That fundamentally altered their strategy.” After all the analysis, Colombia came out near the top of the list, where previously it had not been on the radar screen at all.

Done right, BI can conceivably provide every person in the organization, from C-suite to front line, with information that makes it easier for each to make better decisions on the job. A customer service rep, for example, can pull up a customer’s entire purchase history, favorite products, most recent orders and complaints and be armed with that data when speaking with that customer—ideally leading to better service and retention. There are a host of other potential applications. Comcast, for example, rolled out an interactive reports application for call center reps to do what-if scenarios, designed by OpenSymmetry. The reps were able to view, in real time, how many services they’d sold in a month, and how many more they’d need to reach a certain threshold for reward. “It gives the initiative to the people who otherwise wouldn’t know what they’re going to make. Now they know that if they sell these two additional items, they’ll be eligible to get X,” says Todd LeBaron, CEO of OpenSymmetry.