By Chris Miller
Endeavour Solutions

Sharing of information in a way that benefits the recipient is key to transforming business intelligence into operational intelligence.

Salespeople in the field, for example, should know everything possible about a customer they’re about to visit: what they’ve purchased recently (and how much), whether they’ve stopped buying a particular product, or whether they haven’t bought anything at all for a while. This sort of knowledge can translate into new sales opportunities, or can even reveal a problem in relations with that customer that needs to be put right.

The trouble is, some businesses tend to put the gathering of such information in the ‘too hard’ basket, or they tag it as ‘eyes only’ for senior management.

Keeping it close

The people who control financial information tend to be precious about it for several reasons. For a start, they think that retrieving information from a wide range of financial data is going to take time, and therefore cost money. If they can’t see an instant return on that cost, they’re unlikely to authorise an information-gathering exercise.

Also, let’s not forget the old adage that “information is power”. Those who hold information may believe that dispensing it is their prerogative, and that if anyone can access it, their role is somehow diminished. Some also believe that analysis should be entrusted only to those qualified to do so.

“There’s probably some justification behind that view,” Chris says, “but the lack of that information being distributed throughout the business holds it back, frankly.” Some financial data is also strategically very sensitive. Good business intelligence software delivers specific sets of data which can help a particular person do their job better; they are told only what they need to know. “Reports often create more questions than they answer, and the ability to take a set of data and start answering those questions as you look at it, is extremely important,” Chris explains. “So business intelligence is delivering a set of data with a tool that can allow you to see that data, but also dig deeper into that data.”

Greentree IQ (powered by QlikView) is interactive business intelligence software that reads data and delivers it however the user wants it. Dashboard displays can be customised to show monthly, quarterly or annual statistics and compare them month-on-month or year-on-year, for example. Sales and inventory analysis, supply chain, job costing, budgeting and forecasting can all be loaded and shared, and experienced users can even tailor the system to deliver special sets of figures.

Intelligent use of business data means you can not only see where things may be going wrong, but also look closer at things that are doing well, and discover why. Maybe a sales representative who’s performing better than their colleagues has some insights to share. If a product with a long history of popularity starts to decline, perhaps the market has moved on to something new. You need to spot new trends quickly, or risk being left behind.

Listen, and share

Business intelligence software has to be configured to be sure it’s delivering the information you want. To get this right, the people who’ll be using it need to feel involved in the process; otherwise they may try to do their own analysis. Chris Miller has seen cases of people re-keying their data into separate spreadsheets to try to get information or results they need.

“That’s just an absolute waste of time within an organisation where that’s already been collected once,” he says. “People will often do it because they’re frustrated they can’t get the answers out of the system.

“There is a lot of really good information within organisations that just gets put in and sometimes gets reported but hardly ever gets analysed,” Chris concludes. “The fear, I guess, is that money spent on those processes is not directly related to return of better sales, but if an organisation can spend less time getting the job done, they will become more efficient.”

Republished with permission.