What is business intelligence?

WHAT IS BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE?

Is business intelligence just another buzzword created by software vendors that will ultimately disappoint? Or is it going to deliver the much-promised benefits? Here’s what we think…

Let’s keep this simple

The first thing to say is that business intelligence (BI) isn’t just one thing. This is not what you will hear from software vendors that will have you believe BI is just a piece of software (usually theirs). In fact, BI is a combination of software, infrastructure and skills that provides access to, and analysis of, information to optimise decisions and business performance. It is also used to improve decision-making, cut costs and identify new business opportunities by recognising patterns in operational data and backing them up with hard numbers. In other words, BI helps you to make better business decisions because you’re not having to rely on inaccurate gut feelings.

But how easy is all this to achieve?

Like all things data, BI promises a lot, but implementations are full of technical and cultural challenges.

Follow a few simple steps, however, and you should have a good foundation to make your adoption and use of BI a success:

1. Make sure your data is both clean and consistent

2. Define success before you start

3. Ensure you have a key sponsor and align stakeholders around him or her

4. Scope what kind of reports you want to create by asking what questions you need answers to

5. Treat it as a work in progress (first deliver reports that provide the most value, then tweak)

6. Ensure your users are thoroughly trained or you have an outsourced team in place to work the system for you

7. Don’t buy software until you have points 1 – 3 in place!

Find out more

If you are thinking of implementing a BI solution, get in touch with Ipsos Jarmany. We aren’t tied to any particular software company and we have the experience and expertise to make sure your implementation is a success. Talk to us to find out more.

What is data consolidation?

Great things happen when your data comes together

Data consolidation means collecting, linking and integrating information from different sources depositing it into a single location. It can involve consolidating a few spreadsheets into one or collating the data from a range of wildly different systems and analytics tools.

The value of consolidation is in the insights it generates. With a central repository of information, you can see what’s working and what isn’t. You can also cleanse data — finding out if the same name appears in all five of your sales target databases. At which point, you’re in a great position to move forward.

Delivering real, business-focused outcomes

Working with a global business recently, we created a better understanding of return on investment by benchmarking historic sales data, linking it to investment activities and measuring sales performance both pre- and post-activity. This is the real kind of value we see continuously generated from bringing data together.

Data consolidation isn’t just vital to creating better sales and marketing functions. It’s the core of effective customer service. In many companies, data is still siloed, which means there’s no single, comprehensive view of customer information. Consolidation allows companies to know what their customers were sold yesterday, what they’re doing operationally today and what they might do tomorrow ‒ if they receive the right marketing data.

Do you need to consolidate your data?

There’s simply no point having access to all the data in the world if you can’t bring it together into a single source. Or make it available in an understandable and easily comparable format. If you’d like to find out how we can help you gain one single version of the truth, get in touch today and we’ll be happy to take you through some ideas.

What is Big Data as a Service?

Enter a new way

Just as Software as a Service (SaaS) took away the hassle and expense of enterprise software by putting it in the cloud, the new concept of Big Data as a Service (BDaaS) is making it much easier to extract intelligence from massive tranches of data.

For example, IBM recently launched its Analytics for Twitter service, which provides businesses with access to data and analytics on the social platform’s 280 million monthly active users and 500 million tweets per day. The idea is to provide consultancy, analytical tools and applications for making sense of that messy and unstructured data.

We think this kind of service could get very big indeed.

Big Data for all

The real value of BDaaS is that organisations, particularly SMEs, don’t have to host the infrastructure for big data analysis themselves. They can access the infrastructure for big data analysis through the internet and gain the information that is actually of value. From there, modelling and other data-driven methodologies can determine the best business strategies.

There are caveats, of course. As with any data services strategy, BDaaS requires organisations to have the right data, the right security and the right governance. When done properly, however, data can be harvested through the cloud and employed to develop better business tactics for delivering a business’s goals.

Time to think again?

There’s no doubt that BDaaS can be a highly effective business tool. At the very least, it will open the possibilities of big data to a whole range of organisations that previously thought it wasn’t accessible for them.

Does that sound like you? We’d be happy to talk you through your options.

Why is data mining so important?

The value of digging deep

So, you have access to a lot of data (perhaps even ‘big’ data). Now what are you going to do next? You need some way to turn all those numbers into something useful. You need to see the correlations, the patterns and the relationships — and then model the results to derive some sort of actionable insight. Perhaps even make predictions.

That’s where data mining comes in. And it’s become incredibly useful for some of the country’s most successful businesses.

Who’s benefitting – and how?

Data mining is carried out via data analysis tools that enable businesses to determine the relationships among factors such as price, buying patterns, product positioning or staff skills, plus other areas such as economic indicators, competition and customer demographics.

Businesses can also ‘drill down’ into detailed transactional data and match the patterns in one dataset to another.  For example, retailers like Tesco use point-of-sale records of customer purchases and data from loyalty cards to send targeted promotions based on an individual’s purchase history.

There are numerous other insights that you can mine data for. You can look at the behaviour of predetermined groups, clusters and market segments. You can examine sequential patterns to predict future behaviour. You can also use data analysis tools to unearth previously unknown associations, like ‘when people buy Product A on a Friday, they’re also 80% likely to buy Product B – but only 25% are likely to also buy Product C on a Monday’.

What about your own data goldmine?

At Ipsos Jarmany, we’ve spent a lot of time honing our data mining skills because we know they are key to delivering actionable insights like these that have an impact on decisions that drive sales. Get in touch and we’ll be happy to explain more.