Business Transformation: A Roadmap for Maximizing Organizational Insights

CHAPTER 1

The Critical Role of Business Insight

Have you ever asked a question that no one in your organization could answer? Or maybe someone answered it, but it turned out the information driving the answer was so flawed that you really got no answer at all. Or maybe you got multiple conflicting answers that took hours, days—or maybe even weeks to straighten out.

Have you ever wondered why—in an age when bar codes are on everything, every conversation with a customer is recorded, and the Internet is full of comments about your products and services—you don't really know who your customers are? Or what they want? Or, more important, what they might want next year? Are you frustrated because your organization isn't achieving its goals? Or are you wondering why your organization is not keeping up with the competition?

You are not alone. Information, and the business insight you can derive from it, is coming so fast, from so many sources, in so many different formats, and at such incredible volumes that it is difficult to grasp. It's not hyperbole to suggest that gaining insight from data is like drinking water from a fire hose. Business insight is derived from an organization's information by using the domain knowledge of its resources and applying analytics to mine the data for critical trends, forecast revenue, determine customer propensity to buy products and services, and predict attrition in critical talent. Business insight is also produced by using business intelligence for ...