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    Business Intelligence: The Savvy Manager's Guide
    Business Intelligence: The Savvy Manager's Guide
    Business Intelligence: The Savvy Manager's Guide
    Ebook726 pages75 hours

    Business Intelligence: The Savvy Manager's Guide

    By David Loshin

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    About this ebook

    Business Intelligence: The Savvy Managers Guide, Second Edition, discusses the objectives and practices for designing and deploying a business intelligence (BI) program. It looks at the basics of a BI program, from the value of information and the mechanics of planning for success to data model infrastructure, data preparation, data analysis, integration, knowledge discovery, and the actual use of discovered knowledge.

    Organized into 21 chapters, this book begins with an overview of the kind of knowledge that can be exposed and exploited through the use of BI. It then proceeds with a discussion of information use in the context of how value is created within an organization, how BI can improve the ways of doing business, and organizational preparedness for exploiting the results of a BI program. It also looks at some of the critical factors to be taken into account in the planning and execution of a successful BI program. In addition, the reader is introduced to considerations for developing the BI roadmap, the platforms for analysis such as data warehouses, and the concepts of business metadata. Other chapters focus on data preparation and data discovery, the business rules approach, and data mining techniques and predictive analytics. Finally, emerging technologies such as text analytics and sentiment analysis are considered.

    This book will be valuable to data management and BI professionals, including senior and middle-level managers, Chief Information Officers and Chief Data Officers, senior business executives and business staff members, database or software engineers, and business analysts.

    • Guides managers through developing, administering, or simply understanding business intelligence technology
    • Keeps pace with the changes in best practices, tools, methods and processes used to transform an organization’s data into actionable knowledge
    • Contains a handy, quick-reference to technologies and terminology
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherElsevier Science
    Release dateNov 27, 2012
    ISBN9780123858900
    Business Intelligence: The Savvy Manager's Guide
    Author

    David Loshin

    David Loshin is President of Knowledge Integrity, Inc., a company specializing in data management consulting. The author of numerous books on performance computing and data management, including “Master Data Management" (2008) and “Business Intelligence – The Savvy Manager’s Guide" (2003), and creator of courses and tutorials on all facets of data management best practices, David is often looked to for thought leadership in the information management industry.

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      Book preview

      Business Intelligence - David Loshin

      2012

      Chapter 1

      Business Intelligence and Information Exploitation

      Over the past few decades there has been a monumental transition regarding the creation, collection, and use of data. While great strides have been made in data management, there is always the desire to extract business value hidden within the piles (or rather mountains) of bits and bytes that today are not only stored within structured data systems, but are captured, stored, managed, shared, and distributed across different file formats, representative structures, and even as unstructured data assets.

      But imagine if you had the power to filter out and deliver the gems of knowledge to the right decision-makers that can trigger the right kinds of choices and actions at the optimal times. For example, imagine if you could:

       Identify who your company’s best customers were, predict the amount of money they would be willing to spend over the next three months, and engage your best sales people to contact those customers;

       Predict energy consumption over the next two weeks based on average demand over similar time periods modulated by the different weather patterns so as to best negotiate energy generation, acquisition, and delivery contracts;

       Automatically assess global commodity prices and dynamically balance high net worth client investment portfolios to reduce risk while maintaining a high rate of return;

       Continuously review product profitability and eliminate the worst performing items from the catalog;

       Compare supplier performance based on credit-worthiness, product availability, compliance with contract terms, and product pricing to reduce the number of approved vendors;

       Figure out underserved geographic regions and the relative costs for entering local markets to identify best opportunities for expansion;

       Monitor key aspects impacting customer satisfaction among a collection of traditional sources coupled with social media streams to identify and correct issues in a rapid and effective manner; or

       Provide accurate audit trails demonstrating regulatory compliance to prevent fines and bad publicity.

      All of these scenarios share key characteristics: the results of analyzing data suggest actions for specific individual roles that can lead to business advantage. And these are just a few examples of the kind of knowledge that can be exposed and exploited through the use of business intelligence (BI).

      There is significant value embedded within the collective of sets of information at our disposal, waiting to be discovered and exploited. But to access this hidden treasure, we must first adjust the way we think about data, information, and ultimately, actionable knowledge. Historically, data is the raw material that fueled operational activities and transaction systems. Today, different data sets are used and then repurposed multiple times, simultaneously feeding both operational and analytical processes intended to achieve different business objectives. Limiting the use of those data sets to their original purposes is a thing of the past. Today, and for the foreseeable future, data utility expands to support operational activities as well as tactical and strategic decisions.

      Improving the Decision-Making Process

      Almost every business process presents a situation in which information is collected, manipulated, and results are presented to help individuals make decisions. Some decisions are significant, driving broad organizational strategies; some are business-critical, but may be operational and narrower in scope, such as selecting the most cost-efficient containers that best accommodate the products within each customer’s order. Other decisions may be narrower, such as determining which product advertisements are to be placed in which positions on a web page served to a specific user.

      Every business process has its associated measures of performance, and in a perfect world, each decision would be the optimal one—the decision whose results lead to the best overall performance. But those decision-makers are sometimes prevented from making the optimal decision because they are not provided with the information they need. Providing more information does not necessarily address the situation. When large amounts of unfiltered data are made available across the organization, overwhelmed individuals may be stunned into analysis paralysis—the compulsion to delay decision-making while waiting for just a little bit more data that can simplify (and perhaps justify) that impending decision.

      This paralysis can be diminished if instead of delivering all the data, the information overload is reduced by distilling out the specific information needed to help make the optimal decision so that specific actions can be taken. Delivering trustworthy intelligence to the right people when they need it short-circuits analysis paralysis and encourages rational and confident decisions.

      From the comprehensive strategic perspective, the senior management team can review overall company performance to consider any alternatives for adjusting corporate strategy for long-term value generation. From the immediate, operational perspective, day-to-day activities can be improved with specific pieces of intelligence suggesting adjustments for optimizing activities in real time. In the best scenario, business processes are augmented with the ability to incorporate information that is actionable—streaming the results of analyses directly into the process, tracking performance measures, and indicating when better decisions are being made.

      In the best scenarios, reporting and business analytics contribute to a continuous virtuous cycle between operations, analysis of operations, modifications to business processes driven by the analysis, and then changes to the operational business processes and corresponding applications. Actionable information informs both strategic and operational processes, and its delivery to staff members up and down the organizational chart can facilitate a transition from reacting to what has happened in the past to streamline making the optimal decisions in the future.

      Why a Business Intelligence Program?

      What drives the desire for instituting a BI program? And more to the point, what are the primary drivers for business analytics and how can the benefits be effectively communicated to the important organizational stakeholders?

      A straightforward approach for considering the value of a BI program looks at business processes, their source of derived or generated value, performance measures, and where the absence of knowledge impedes the complete achievement of business success. By categorizing dimensions of business value, we can then evaluate the ways that BI can contribute to increased performance along those dimensions. A high-level overview suggests at least these dimensions of value:

       Financial value associated with increased profitability, whether derived from lowered costs or increased revenues;

       Productivity value associated with increased throughput with decreased workloads, diminished time for executing end-to-end processes (such as manufacturing or operational workflows), and increasing the percentage of high quality products or outcomes;

       Trust value, such as greater customer, employee, or supplier satisfaction, as well as increasing confidence in forecasting, maintaining consistent operational and management reports, reductions in time spent in analysis paralysis, and better results from decisions; and

       Risk value associated with improved visibility into credit exposure, confidence in capital and asset investments, and auditable compliance with jurisdictional and industry standards and regulations.

      Of course, there are many other benefits to building a BI practice within an organization. Some benefits are focused on the ability to answer what might be considered the most basic questions about how a company does business. For example, it is surprising how few senior managers within a company can answer simple questions about their business, such

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