Business Intelligence – How to manage company performance?

All companies rely on data to make strategic decisions to drive revenue.  I attended a panel discussion on the use of Business Intelligence at SDforum in Silicon Valley. It was an interesting discussion covering various aspects of Business Intelligence deployment.

How is Business Intelligence used in start-ups?

• Monitor customer activity and upsell and cross-sell products in a SaaS model
• Refine customer acquisition and retention strategy by observing customer behavior on websites
• Modify business strategy based on certain patterns of customer behavior
• Uncover surprises from customer behavior, analyze and test it again for closed loop feedback

Drawbacks of Business Intelligence

• Data addiction and assumptions based on a certain data pattern
• Lean towards  business strategies based on dashboard data instead of direct customer interaction to collect data
• Quality of data is somewhat unpredictable.  BI data skewed if customers implement the product/service incorrectly.

Cost effective – Inhouse or commercially available tools

• Hybrid approach of developing inhouse and using commercially available tools based on data needs
• Tradeoff between cost and data needs in choosing third party BI tools
• Inhouse development of BI tools takes away product development resources from the pool

How do companies build a data driven culture?

• Business Intelligence needs executive support and advocacy within a compnay to build a data driven culture
• Find simple metrics to illustrate a point to facilitate business decisions
• Executives must exhibit a passion for understanding customer behavior to alter business strategy
• Goal setting to alter the business decisions by choosing a few metrics
• BI reports with different levels of details, different frequencies provided to various internal organizations- CEO receives a summarized version, VP of product development receives more details etc.

I will conclude this post by saying that “Business Intelligence” needs “Human Intelligence” to interpret the data and leverage the reports to make appropriate business decisions.  The “Human Element” factor plays a vital role in the ultimate usefulness of BI tools to any company.

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