by Angela Guess
Ann All recently commented on the need to create a business intelligence culture within a business in order for BI efforts to be successful. She states, “For some time now there’s been a lot of buzz about companies getting business intelligence into the hands of more users, with the aim of getting the right information to the right people at the right time (or words to that effect). The conventional wisdom: Companies are limiting the potential usefulness of BI by making it available only to specialists, who create reports from centralized data and make those reports available only to select decision makers.”
All continues, “Not everyone agrees with this, of course. In 2009 I interviewed Nigel Pendse, a principal with OLAP Solutions who had just authored that year’s version of the BI Survey, a report produced by the Business Application Research Center. He told me vendors were pushing the idea of so-called pervasive BI simply to sell more software licenses. While many folks require access to operational information, few of them actually need to perform analysis on it, he said.”
She goes on, “Yet several companies featured in a recent Computerworld article are seeing tangible results from getting more users involved with BI. At 1-800-Flowers.com, users with access to real-time sales data created a quicker checkout process for fast-selling items, which the article says likely reduced costs and increased customer satisfaction. Bobby Nix, director of BI and analytics at consumer services company Allconnect, credits a 26 percent sales increase in 2011′s first quarter to newfound staff expertise with BI, saying it helped sales associates focus on the best sales opportunities. And the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden saw a 30.7 percent per-capita increase in food and beverage sales from October 2010 through the first quarter of 2011 that the director of park operations attributes to BI.”
photo credit: Anders.Bachmann
