What is Business Intelligence?

Early in my career, I was encouraged to always ask even the simplest and most obvious questions, including questions about well-known topics that were assumed to be understood by everyone. With that in mind, let’s answer the question, “What is business intelligence (BI)?”

As you read this post, you probably fall into one of these three categories:

You know exactly what BI is because you eat, sleep, and breathe it every day. BI is in your business DNA.
The term means nothing more than the name of an exotic tech cocktail that might have pierced your ears, figuratively speaking of course.
You‘re somewhere in between the two extremes. You’ve been exposed to the term, but haven’t had a chance yet to fully digest it or appreciate it.
Do you have something to learn about BI? Let’s roll up our sleeves and get to work.

Leave a commentBiz Intelligence

Modelling Business Processes

Most, if not all organisations, constantly strive to improve performance. There are only three basic ways of doing this: reducing costs, improving income, or finding new ways to satisfy their customers. Out of these, cost reduction has been a dominant theme and is typically achieved by telling budget holders not to spend. But logically this can only go so far – at some point the impact on saving costs will be minimal. Also just cutting budgets could mean that some vital activities may become underfunded, which in turn will have an adverse affect on improving performance. But there might be a better way ….

Leave a commentStrategy

Why We Love and Hate Models

A model is meant to be a simplified representation of reality created for a specific purpose. We often try to build models to understand the flow and interactions between different parts of a system or predict certain outcomes. Think of a map used to navigate from point A to point B. Although it may not include every street, it shows some of the main paths to follow to get to point B, which is what we need.

Models need to rely on assumptions that don’t always apply perfectly to reality. This frustrates many of us, and even makes us wonder why we use models if they rely on faulty assumptions.

Leave a commentUncategorized

3 BI Lessons that Made Cheezburger a More Intelligent Business

I recently had the opportunity to chat with Loren Bast, Director of Business Intelligence at online humor network Cheezburger. Cheezburger invested in a new BI tool because it was unable to keep up with the amount of data it was producing across its popular humor websites such as I Can Has Cheezburger and FAIL Blog.

I asked Bast how he would have managed the project differently if he could start again. He said in an ideal world, he would have focused more on the following three things:

Leave a commentBiz Intelligence

Accounting for Social Media

What are generally accepted accounting standards for Tweets?

LinkedIn, the professional social-networking site, reported yesterday that its profits jumped 30% and its revenue more than doubled in its last quarter (from $81.7 million last year to $167.7 million), strongly suggesting there’s a financial reality underpinning the buzz and hype surroundingsocial media.

That reality was reflected in last week’s PricewaterhouseCoopers “4th Annual Digital IQ Survey” of nearly 500 U.S. business and technology executives, which reported that 80% of PwC’s “top performers” (defined as companies in their industry’s top quartile for annual revenue, growth, and profitability) expected to increase their use of Twitter to engage with customers, and 62% planned to invest in social media for either internal or external communications. Sixty-six percent of those companies also said they’ll be collecting more customer data this year, presumably via channels that include social-media feeds.

The question of how to account for all that data is, of course, the CFO’s to answer.

Leave a commentaccounting, Finance