Jon Strong

London

Management Consultant

Why is business intelligence so hard? Part of the answer to this might be that the Managerial Processes around using the information / data that is made available through systems need to be changed. Management Process Re-engineering!

For example
It has been a source of wonder to me that the major telcos, despite having sophisticated customer segmentation software etc., seem not to be able to identify customers about to churn, even when the customer tells them. Trying to explain to my provider that their 3G data offering was not competitive, as could be deduced by someone in their marketing department spending 5 minutes searching the internet, was a pointless exercise. There was no process to come back with an offer. The irony was that it is in my suppliers published corporate strategy to raise the average revenue per user through selling additional services. I now have two providers, one for mobile data services and one for telephony. Could either provider supply a package deal that recognises the value of my revenue stream in its totality, You guessed it, No! Consequentially I represent a revenue stream that is below each company's target, yet my combined spend is greater than target. Companies need to look at putting in place the supporting processes to extract the value from the data they have. Call centre staff need the expertise to either make a deal or refer the customer to someone who can. I think sales and marketing teams need to look at things from the Customer's perspective, "I want..." , "I need... ". Marketing 101 as our transatlantic cousins refer to it. Collecting all that customer data in the BI system is only of value if there are the supporting systems and processes in the rest of the business to change how things are done in the light of the information available. That requires a change in management process to preceed the change in business process.