The Profit Impact of Business Intelligence

For example, changing the culture around use of information and analytical applications will take longer than improving technical readiness, which in some instances can be addressed by strategic hiring, training, and/or use of consultants.

In the past, most bases for customer (market) segmentation were so-called a priori bases; that is, they were based on information one could know about customers as a group

The company employs effective IT governance mechanisms that promote an effective business/IT partnership. Those mechanisms include executive-level and working-level steering committees, regular off-site planning meetings, and

The operational impact on BI is that, at a minimum, the regular batch data extract process must take place after the regular operating hours of the business so that the performance of transactional applications is not adversely impacted.

we see it, the primary categories of risk that the BI program must manage are business adoption risk and technical execution

Ironically, the very flexibility of RDBMSs, combined with the high cost for enterprise uses, creates a common business and IT challenge for BI.

For any given company, the choice of business design dictates the performance objectives of core business processes and the elements of business performance that are important to plan, measure, control, and improve.

Wal-Mart has not only invested in BI but has also aligned BI with its strategic goals, has aligned its business processes to use the information BI makes available, and has even helped its suppliers align their systems and processes with those of Wal-Mart.

In actual practice, we find that many very successful companies do not have readily available process metrics for the as-is state, for example, process costs, process cycle times, and process effectiveness measures. That said, we find that experienced business

Data integration. The data architecture must also provide a means by which data from different sources, which can range from operational systems to enterprise applications such as ERP to data from individual spreadsheets, can be brought together to create an integrated, consistent view of related parts of the company’s business.