Speaking at the recent ITWeb Business Intelligence Conference, Kevin Kemp, Sales Manager for the Commercial Division at SAS Institute, presented on how to make a successful business case for BI and how to quantify the return on your investment.
Kemp highlighted that Gartner's EXPO January 2009 report revealed that BI is rated as the number one technology priority for the CIO for 2009. This is because now more than ever CIOs need to predict and prepare where their business is going. With budget cuts and scarce resources, BI can help optimise spending, cut costs and distribute resources to get the most out of your business.
In the same report, 'business process improvement' and 'increasing the use of analytics' came in first and fifth respectively as business priorities for this year. Again, BI steps up to the plate to help optimise the use of limited resources and budgets.
“These rankings clearly demonstrate the need for BI across all industries and throughout economic climate ups and downs. As businesses move more towards customer centricity and driving performance, so BI has become a necessity and not a luxury,” says Kemp.
BI solutions themselves have evolved, now catering for global and SME markets, they offer the benefits of five separate models to suit any environment. These five models consist of classic BI, classic BI with data quality, BI with feedback loops, real-time BI and business activity monitoring.
Looking at the economic downturn, companies with BI predictive capabilities were far more likely to have anticipated their results and would have had the opportunity to prepare and weather the business dry spells. BI has the capability to take every business from asking 'what happened' to predicting 'what will happen', working out best and worst scenarios and being appropriately prepared for both.
“When analytics is embedded in your business processes, from your senior managers down through to your IT, analytics and business areas, the results quantify your business ROI through benefits like full customer segmentation, demand forecasting, resource optimisation and the ability to make real-time decisions,” adds Kemp.
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