The Profit Impact of Business Intelligence

7.3 Business Intelligence for Management Processes Building on the information presented in Table 7-3,

This might sound heretical, but IT too often assumes that the SMEs understand BI and its potential—when they don’t. Because

Accordingly, BI capabilities that promote top-caliber customer service and make it easy to do business with McCormick are also important.

and how it would generate the incremental revenue and/or reduced costs from the BI-driven process change.

conversation we had with the chief information officer (CIO) of a well-known consumer packaged goods manufacturer. When told about the findings from the McKinsey study cited above, he said, “I doubt that our CEO has spent 4.5 hours on IT in his life, let alone in a single month.”

It is common, however, that organizations invest in BI/DW initiatives without having a clear understanding of what informational capabilities they are building, why they need those capabilities, and how they will contribute to achieving business goals and objectives.

driving the use of BI into the core business processes and decisions that determine business results. Business-centric methods go beyond traditional approaches by putting rigor into defining the business value capture mechanism for each BI project.

Typically, organizations grossly underestimate the effort required to institutionalize and optimize the use of the BI asset.

For example, we worked with a client several years ago who was used to generating a campaign mailing list from valid names in a database. To improve the response rate and reduce the marketing costs associated with obtaining a response, a BI application was developed to support customer segmentation analysis and to generate a targeted list of high-p