Business Analytics for Managers: Taking Business Intelligence beyond Reporting

Chapter 3. Development and Deployment of Information at the Functional Level

Business analytics (BA) creates value only if operational processes are improved or if new ones are initiated. Your lead information is used to improve existing processes or initiate completely new business processes. Your lag information is used to measure existing processes, typically via key performance indicators (KPIs). In this chapter, we look at the second of the five levels in the BA model introduced in Chapter 1. At this level, we identify how to get from having some overall objectives for a department to being able to specify the information requirements. We discuss the relationship between BA and the operational level and the relationship between strategic plans and how to operationalize them with a focus on the BA function's deliveries.

So what we do is to specify which information we need in order to implement the objectives we have been given as a department, based on the corporate strategy from the last chapter. Another way of describing this is to talk about developing an information strategy, because just as we need to formulate a customer relationship management (CRM) strategy to reflect the overall strategy and its requirements to the CRM function, we also need to have an information strategy in place that reflects the requirements of the corporate strategy to BA. The relationship is illustrated in Exhibit 3.1, which is an elaboration of Exhibit 2.3. In order to show the relationship between ...