Imhoff: Bad Economy Helps BI Prove its Value

September 14, 2009

Claudia Imhoff on BI:

Business Intelligence (BI) is an environment in which the business community receives information that is reliable, consistent, easily understood and manipulated.

imhoffii The analytics produced permit not only a good view of what has happened in the organization but also where it will be in the near future and what is happening right now. I see BI as the overarching term for all analytics including those for market and competitive intelligence analyses.

BI has been used for years in the area of finance; the ability to analyze customer behaviors and buying patterns, determine profitable products and services, as well as the ability to detect fraudulent activities just a bit faster than ever before are just a few examples of how BI has contributed to smarter, more effective financial organizations.

Some best practices for any company wishing to start or expand their BI efforts include:

Understand the business problem to be solved.

Ensure business involvement in the project and ultimate BI solution.

Build a sustainable architecture that is scalable (in data volumes and numbers of concurrent users), can support the performance demands it will incur, and is flexible in terms of the types of analytics it can support.

BI for financial institutions is undergoing a significant change as more and more data is captured by enterprises. The volumes of data and myriad of more sophisticated analytics that can be performed on this data are only just now being implemented and understood – and finance is leading the way!

–Claudia Imhoff, Ph.D.

About Claudia Imhoff: Claudia Imhoff, Ph.D., the President and Founder of Intelligent Solutions, is a popular and dynamic speaker and internationally recognized expert on analytical CRM, business intelligence, and the infrastructure to support these initiatives – the Corporate Information Factory (CIF Dr. Imhoff has co-authored five highly-regarded and popular books on these subjects and writes monthly columns (totaling more than 60) for technical and business magazines. She has served on the Board of Advisors for DAMA International and was chosen by the DAMA organizations to receive the 1999 Individual Achievement Award. She is an advisor and a faculty member for The Data Warehousing Institute and serves as an advisor for several technology and commercial companies.

Posted by Carl · Filed Under Business Intelligence