Making your BI program world-class

We recently ran across an article from Timo Elliott, answering the question of “What Does a World-Class BI Program Look Like?” He writes that successful programs incorporate five separate elements:

• Focus on changing the business
• Focus on people
• Provide some simple data access for everyone
• Tell stories
• Stick with it

The end result, he writes, is that a world-class BI program “successfully changes the information culture of the organization.” We agree, but we’d go a little bit further.

• Successful BI implementations are game-changers. They don’t merely take what you’re already doing and make it a little better; they move you into a completely new realm of possibilities. In traditional programs, BI can be used to better understand customer thinking, help predict their future behavior and anticipate their needs. More recently, as the size of data sets have exploded (the so-called “Big Data” initiative), billions of customer transactions are being analyzed in a fraction of the time it used to require, providing near real-time understanding of market trends. Specialties such as sentiment analysis and the mining of social data are newcomers, but would not have been possible without the technology improvements of the last several years.

• WIIFM? Marketers everywhere will recognize this acronym; it means “What’s in it for me?” Simply put, a successful BI program must contain a WIIFM for everyone who interacts with it, from the C-suite all the way down to the customer service reps on the front lines. Good BI implementations no longer require oodles of time, money or personnel commitment: the emergence of BI SaaS programs, like our Data Warehousing as a Service, means that programs can be quickly implemented and begin producing tangible results at a fraction of the cost it used to take. The WIIFM for those who need the data is obvious; the WIIFM for your CFO is equally so.

• Fulfill the vision. The beauty of BI SaaS, as well as market-driven improvements such as analytical appliances on commodity hardware, is that companies can move quickly to test out the potential benefits of BI initiatives. Things like ROI and TCO have never been more important than they are in today’s economy; BI’s evolution has made it possible to imagine what your company could do with a greater level of insight and to actually implement it, rather than leaving the vision on the wish list indefinitely.

Above all else, we’d expand Timo’s thinking: well-strategized BI programs, properly implemented, change not only the “information culture of the organization.” They change the organization itself, as well as every person who comes into contact with it.

New product announcements are fine, but how are they helping businesses?

The idea for this blog posting comes not from what people are talking about; it is from what they aren’t discussing. Like any business day, today there are a number of news releases available about this or that new service or product. Each promises to deliver significant benefits at lower cost in less time…in short, what we’ve all come to expect from news releases of this type.

The thing that strikes us most, however, is the dearth of stories about customers who are actively using a product to make a difference in the way they do business. And yet prospects who are actively seeking to find a solution to their challenges are going to be looking for that kind of information.

So whenever we can, we make a habit of leading with stories about our customers, and how our WX2 analytical database has made the difference that allows them to be more competitive in the marketplace. For example, a company such as Segmetrix. Its founders had a great idea: what if we could, they thought, make it possible for marketers to take multiple mailing lists and clean them up, standardizing the lists in a mere fraction of the time it was taking data analysts to do it manually? And what if they delivered it as a cloud-based service, helping those marketers keep their costs to a minimum and allowing them to focus on the results they needed, and not the underlying technology?

Segmetrix knew what it wanted to do, but couldn’t find the company that would help it meet its vision…until it found Kognitio. Today, Segmetrix’s Match2Lists.com is a leader in its market, and the guys who run it will gladly tell you that Kognitio was an integral part of its success.

That’s the kind of information that people are seeking: while news releases about the latest and greatest are fine, people really want to know how products can make their lives easier, more successful and more profitable.

Incidentally, watch this space for further news on Match2Lists.com.

Is your glass half-full or half-empty?

A Corporate Executive Board survey finds that corporate IT budgets are going to grow by an average of more than three percent next year. It’s the first increase in three years.

Of course, if you’re a “the glass is half-empty” kind of person, it’s going to be very easy to disregard this news: you might add that they won’t be spending like they did in the past. In fact, they may never spend like they used to!

Quite true, but this is good news from our perspective. Here’s why: the survey found that much of the increase will be “spent on services that can provide analytics and other tools that help target customers,” according to the Wall Street Journal. But as they spend more on the services, they’ll be spending less on the hardware that’s needed to make the services work. Instead, they’ll be working with companies that can deliver those services through cloud computing.

Which means that services like Kognitio’s Data Warehousing as a Service (DaaS) offering are well positioned to deliver the kind of results that companies are seeking. They need to analyze greater amounts of data than ever (the so-called “Big Data” initiative), in less time than ever, and make the results available to more of their workers in a timely manner.

And, as the survey found, they simply don’t have unlimited amounts of money to spend to make it all happen, as may have been the case several years ago.

The lesson here is clear: businesses are seeking more efficient ways of doing business. And if you’re not one of them, your competitors are looking to gain on you…or surpass you. If, in fact, they haven’t already done so. It may be time to take a long, hard look at what you do as a company, and the way you do it…and to ask yourself if there are more effective and efficient ways of doing it. Data Warehousing as a Service is an incredibly effective way of enabling your firm to do the deep dive analytics required in today’s marketplace, but it’s only one of the options you should consider.

The result, of course, will be a company that fires on all cylinders, nimbly responding to changes in the market to help keep you at or near the front of the pack. And that’s worth than just half of a glass.