• Embed Doc
  • Copy Link
  • Readcast
  • Collections
  • CommentGo Back
 
BOARDROOM IMPERATIVE
Business Analytics
Six Questions To Ask About Information And Competition
© 2008 nGenera Corporation
Provided by SAS and Intel
 
WHAT IS BUSINESS ANALYTICS?
Corporations today are awash in inormation yet short ontools, methods, and talent or using it. Inormation about themost important acets o the business – customers, processes,employees, competition – is gathered but not analyzed,reported but not understood, guessed about rather than actedupon. As a result, the status quo prevails and opportunities toimprove perormance, oten dramatically, go unnoticed.There are exceptions. Smart organizations have always triedto make the most o the inormation in hand. But recenttechnological breakthroughs have provided the ability tomanage and make sense o vast amounts o hitherto unrelateddata – and in the process have redened what it means to bea smart organization. Aggressive competitors recognize thesenew capabilities and put them to work. They don’t just gatherand report inormation – they leverage it through
business analytics 
:
•
Capital One
, which grows organically at 20% per year byanalyzing 60,000 product conguration experiments a yearand ollow through on the most promising.
•
Progressive
, which analyzes specic market sub-segmentsto “skim the cream” and protably insure customers intraditionally high-risk categories.
•
Harrah’s Entertainment
, which uses a customer loyaltyprogram and predictive modeling techniques to identiy andretain the most protable customers.
•
Marriott International
, which has modeled its business anddistributed analytic tools so that every property can maximizerevenue not only rom hotel rooms and rates, but also romconerence acilities, catering, and other services.
•
Procter & Gamble
, which has drawn 100 analysts rom acrossthe enterprise to address the most complex cross-unctionalissues, such as maximizing growth in existing markets andoptimizing supply networks.
•
UPS
, which expanded its statistical expertise in logisticsand package tracking to anticipate and infuence customeractions and minimize attrition.
“Technological breakthroughshave redefnedwhat it means to bea smart organization.”
These progressive companies have many things in commonabout how they operate:
•Theyusesophisticateddata-collectiontechnologyand
analysis methods to wring every last drop o value rom theirmost strategic business processes.
•Theyunderstandwhatmotivatescustomersandmakesthem
protable.
 
•Theyunderstandwhatmotivatesemployeesandkeepsthem
engaged and productive.
•Theydon’tjusttracktheirbusiness–theymodelit,anticipate
how proposed changes will play out, predict and preventbottlenecks.
•Theydon’tjustconceiveandenactbusinesschanges–they
experiment to determine the best changes to make and thebest implementation methods.
•Theydon’tjustprovidemanagerswithreports–they
distribute inormation and analytic tools to decision-makersat every level, so employees can act upon evidence andmake better decisions day-in and day-out.
Business analytics 
involves using sophisticated technologyto bring inormation together and sophisticated algorithmsto lter and analyze that inormation. The outputs can includedeep understanding o the workings o the business and itsconnections to the marketplace, key perormance indicatorsto drive business decisions, dramatic improvements inthe perormance o the most critical business processes,and insights and innovations that can change the basis o competition.
Business analytics 
is a simple idea with complex ramications –leverage the wealth o data being collected today to createpowerul new ways to perorm and compete. Business analyticsis the new rontier o management science and practice. In this
Boardroom Imperative
, we invite you to explore it with us.
Since the late 1980’s, corporations have been capitalizingon the techniques o business process reengineering. Theunderlying approach was simple yet dramatic – use up-to-datecomputing and communications to share business inormationmore widely and thus to cut across unctional silos, eliminatehandos and errors, coordinate better, reduce costs, andraise perormance. At its best, reengineering entailed theundamental redesign o end-to-end business processes to takebetter advantage o both human and technological capability.Today, leading corporations are capitalizing on the techniqueso business analytics to achieve new breakthroughs in processperormance. With the help o up-to-date technology, theyuse business inormation dierently – discovering hithertoinvisible connections and patterns, getting a handle on the truekeys to perormance, developing new metrics, and managingprocesses (and across processes) more eectively. Some arereengineering again to take even better advantage o humanand technological capability, especially the ability to makeinormed decisions.The next wave o business reengineering is being powered bybusiness analytics, and the potential perormance breakthroughsare just as large as they were 15 or so years ago. Many o thesebreakthroughs will come through the ability to integrate thedemand side o the house with the supply side o the house asnever beore. Even inormation-rich industries have tended toconcentrate on one side or the other. With the power o businessanalytics, corporations can make and manage the demand-supply connections – a big step closer to the goal o optimizingthe perormance o the corporation as a whole.
of 00

Leave a Comment

You must be to leave a comment.
Submit
Characters: ...
You must be to leave a comment.
Submit
Characters: ...