Business Intelligence Strategy

"Luminoso enterprises was a Human Resource management outsourcing firm. It had consistent growth. However, due to a sudden market shift, that the management did not predict in time, the firm's turnover started reducing. Soon, the work load reduced, leading to lesser work for each employee. This gave rise to retrenchment. As such, the existing employees started getting frustrated. Few resigned and the other's performances took a major hit. Slowly, within a span of 6 months, Luminoso enterprises needed to declare bankruptcy and shut down."

Where did Luminoso enterprises go wrong? They were not prepared for the coming market shift. What should they have done instead? They should have concentrated on developing better business intelligence strategies.

Business intelligence, per se, is information collected by a business in order to increase its understanding itself. A little odd? Why would a business want to understand itself? Well, the business needs to understand itself so that the business can perform better and can use its resources optimally.

So how does a business go about acquainting itself with itself? It generates a warehouse of information regarding its performance and policies in the past. This helps the business to perform better in the future. Like, in case of a certain market shift, the company can refer to its database and find out how it performed, the last time, a similar shift occurred. This may provide added support for the planning.

OLAP
Online Analytical Processing basically stores all the information about the company. Then, it analyzes it and when a certain query is fed in to it, it provides as accurate an answer as possible. It can provide pure facts about the past and can make plausible predictions about the future. OLAP has been of massive help to organizations in times of sudden market inflations. It has also helped many organizations prepare for times of recession to a certain extent. The vital aspects of OLAP are, data mining, text mining, analytics and predictive analytics.

Business Performance Management
BPM is another extremely important strategy that almost all companies follow for BIS. BPM consists of a basic module. All the activities and policies of the company are based on this module. It is the foundation on the business framework and as such it is like the pillar of the business practices. BPM of the business is often responsible for a company's reputation. This is because, the BPM, ordinarily, remains constant for fairly long periods of time. It also helps the employees have a certain level of confidence and feeling of stability.

Benchmarking
In this system, the cost, cycle time, productivity, or quality of a specific process or method is compared to that of another organization that is similar in industry and universally accepted as best practice standard. Like, any IT company would, probably, benchmark Microsoft. In case the disparity of scale is too high, proportional ratings can be used. It is more like having an ambition to perform like a certain "big brother" of the industry. In order to achieve that, you need to have certain practices that need to match it as well. Benchmarking is a concept that individuals use in all walks of life. Not a very difficult concept to follow, right?

Organizations have to basically depend on their own resources in order to sustain market changes and internal instabilities, if any. The main corporate social responsibility of any organization is employee compensation. As such, it is essential for it to have sustainable and consistent growth so that all the employees stay motivated enough to help any strategy of the organization to work well and to its capacity's fullest!