Growing Your Business Intelligently

Business is getting more and more competitive and many organizations are looking to be able to get an edge by collecting data and analyzing it to make better business decisions. One company may want look at weather patterns to better stock their stores while another may need to analyze information to figure out how the introduction of a new product may cannibalize the sales of other products.

The use of business intelligence is not just for large conglomerates. The technology is available so that smaller and mid-sized companies can also make use of data to grow their businesses intelligently. But the implementation of a business intelligence system is not without its challenges.

Join me as I chat with Ed Raffin from National Money Mart, Paul Barter from T4G and Ryan Dochuk from Microsoft Canada and we discuss common pitfalls of using business intelligence for performance management and how National Money Mart is avoiding them and using business intelligence for its planning department.

The podcast is available in both MP3 and WMA formats. For more information about this podcast series, check out the IT Manager Podcast web page.

Podcast Interview Time Index with Topics

Time (mm:ss)	Topic
00:00	Introduction of the IT Manager Podcast series
00:33	Introduction to topic
01:36	Introduction of guests
03:16	Definition of "performance management" and "business intelligence"
05:02	Why is business intelligence and performance management important? Why now?
08:05	Benefits that National Money Mart hopes to see with their implementation of Microsoft Performance Point Server
11:41	Cultural changes to how the business data is managed, looked at and accessed
12:42	Challenges of implementing a business intelligence system
18:48	How do you deal with making sure your data is relevant and consistent?
21:50	Other pitfalls to consider when thinking about business intelligence
25:21	Advice on how business can overcome the barriers to using business intelligence
26:19	Things National Money Mart has done to have a successful implementation
29:01	Discussion about managing the data at a deeper level and answer more complicated business questions
31:59	Advice on how to drive the adoption of business intelligence across an organization
35:40	Comments on where the push needs to come from for an organization to implement a BI system
38:21	Business intelligence resources from Microsoft and T4G
39:10	Closing

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 11, 2008
  hi Ruth, Business Intelligence is still too elitist and growing still too slow. Currently business intelligence is in corporate arena and it needs to move to consumer. <a href="http://blog.maia-intelligence.com">MAIA intelligence</a> blogs on various business intelligence related issues. Let us improve with your valuable comments.

• Anonymous
  January 16, 2008
  Hi Ashi, What you say is true. In fact, it's still mainly in the realm of large businesses, but it's now becoming cost effective (and, imho, necessary) for smaller and mid-sized businesses. It would be nice to be able to use BI as a consumer when making decisions. I like the examples you use in your blog post (http://blog.maia-intelligence.com/?p=14) of using BI to choose schools, banks and healthcare. I think we've still got a ways to go before that becomes reality, though.