8 High-Function Business Intelligence in e-business
? Which marketing campaigns have been most successful?
? Which sales channels are most effective for which products?
? How can we improve the caliber of our customers' overall experience?
Most companies have the raw data to answer these questions, since operational
systems generate vast quantities of product, customer and market data from
point-of-sale, reservations, customer service, and technical support systems.
The challenge is to extract this information and reap its full potential.
Many companies take advantage of only a small fraction of their data for strategic
analysis. The remaining untapped data, often combined with data from external
sources like government reports, trade associations, analysts, the Internet, and
purchased information, is a gold mine waiting to be explored, refined, and
shaped into vital corporate knowledge. This knowledge can be applied in a
number of ways, ranging from charting overall corporate strategy to
communicating personally with employees, vendors, suppliers, and customers
through call centers, kiosks, billing statements, the Internet, and other touch
points that facilitate genuine one-to-one marketing on an unprecedented scale.
e-business impact on BI
Early business information systems were viewed as being standalone strategic
decision making applications separate from operational systems that manage
day to day business operations and supply data to the data warehouse and data
marts.
However, the information and analyses provided by these systems have become
vital to tactical day-to-day decision making as well, and are being integrated into
the overall business processes.
In particular, e-business is:
? Encouraging this integration since organizations need to be able to react
faster to changing business conditions in the e-business world than they do in
the brick and mortar environment. The integration of business information
systems into the overall business process can be achieved by building a
closed loop decision making system in which the output of BI applications is
routed to operational systems in the form of recommended actions such as
product pricing changes for addressing specific business issues.
? Causing organizations to consider extending this closed loop process to the
real-time automatic adjustment of business operations and marketing
campaigns based on the decisions made by the BI system. Such a real-time
closed loop system would deliver on-demand analytics for decision making
capable of providing a significant competitive edge.