Business Intelligence Is In Todays Global Competition

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

The topic of this seminar is How Business Intelligence is in Today’s Global Competition. The speaker is Jack Cheung, a seasonal expert in information technology. During the seminar, Jack talked about six major points, which were the concept of business intelligence; how business intelligence provides business values to enterprises; popular BI applications; challenges of implementing business intelligence projects; hot business intelligence topics in 2013 (big data, cloud and social networking) and BI career development.

After the detailed explanation of the above points, I really benefited a lot from this seminar. To begin with, business intelligence is useful and practical for knowledge discovery. When companies apply those BI systems, like Decision Support System (DSS), Executive Information System (EIS), Business Performance Management (BPM), Corporate Performance Management (CPM), Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) and Business Analytics, companies can discover useful data for their further development. Moreover, with the BI systems, overall performance of finance can be improved.

Additionally, implementing business intelligence project requires many tools and techniques to overcome the difficulties as well as challenges. Enterprises have to develop their integrated abilities in data mining, project management, knowledge management and soft skills.

Seminar Content

When it comes to the definition of business intelligence, it mainly refers to a subject-oriented process that explores data, data relationships and trends, which assists business decision making. Actually, business intelligence transfers data to knowledge, flat tables to multi-aspect views and even data into business value.

Then what kind of business value can business intelligence provide to enterprises? The answer is that business intelligence can facilitate companies to achieve its financial objective, such as increasing revenue by 20% or increasing profit margin by 5%. In other words, business intelligence enables better execution on strategy.

As to business intelligence applications, they include BI reports and dashboards, budget planning, financial consolidation and reporting, what-if analysis, balanced scorecard and data mining. In this part, Jack elaborated BI applications by some detailed examples. Take Key Performance Indicator (KPI) as a typical example. Actually, KPI is a rather important factor in performance measurement. Then companies can use the following indicators to measure KPI, such as average revenue per user, staff turnover, GDP per capita of a country, GDP growth rate, graduation rate and success in finding employment after graduation, etc.

During the process of implementing business intelligence projects, there are still a number of challenges, i.e. data, project management, knowledge and soft skills. First, the data is big. After system gets the data, it has to analyze the quality, definition and sources of metadata, which is a challenging job. Second, implementing business intelligence belongs to project management. Therefore, project leader should pay attention to the scope, time, cost, communication management. Doing user acceptance testing is quite necessary before launching the product. Third, business intelligence requires a wide range of knowledge from technical skills, business, finance and accounting, etc. Finally, soft skills are also concerned by BI. In other words, you should possess good interpersonal skills to communicate with people. Besides, language and cultural difference could also be challenges. As a result, it is necessary for people to enhance the above abilities to overcome the challenges. In short, when implementing BI projects, we need to think big and start small.

At the end of the seminar, Jack also explained business intelligence of Facebook. Undoubtedly, Facebook contains a great deal of information about its users in terms of demographics, interest graph, activity graph, life events and social graph. Therefore, companies can make good use of these data to analyze their customers’ interest. Later on, corresponding marketing strategy can be launched to cater those customers’ needs.

Analysis & Discussion

After listening to the seminar, I wonder why organizations need business intelligence. For one thing, companies have to respond to threats and opportunities. Today’s business environment is characterized by factors such as unstable market conditions, fierce competition, shorter product life cycles, more stringent regulations, and wider choices for customers than ever before. With the help of business intelligence, enterprises can make better and more accurate decisions in this increasingly complex, fast-changing and competitive environment by more effectively collecting and analyzing both internal and external data. Business intelligence solutions can provide quick returns, as they help to quickly react to problems by providing the right information at the right time. Furthermore, business intelligence helps to leverage existing systems by enabling decision makers to extract and analyze data provided by those systems. Finally, quick returns can be provided by helping organizations to focus on customer satisfaction, helping to retain the most profitable customers. For another, effective planning is continuous. As a matter of fact, successful organizations are utilizing a continuous planning process. In a continuous planning process, organizations continuously monitor and analyze business processes; the results lead to ongoing adjustments to how the organization is managed, but these results are also reflected in ongoing updates to the organizational plans. It is only through timely and accurate business intelligence that continuous planning can be executed. [1]

As Jack mentioned, it was challenging to implement a business intelligence project. Based on my further research, I would like to share a real case i.e. Business Intelligence at Hong Kong Airport. [2] It is well known that Hong Kong Airport is one of the world’s most perilous international airports. Due to increasing competition from various cities, like Shenzhen, Dongguan and Guangzhou, Hong Kong airport has to seek for new strategies to retain its market share. Hence, making strategic decisions in such complicated scenarios requires high quality business intelligence. Before implementing business intelligence project, Hong Kong Airport must excel in knowledge discover so as to facilitate strategic decision making in the complex environment. The long-term focus of Hong Kong International Airport’s planning activities, the intense level of public scrutiny of its decision making, and the large amount invested in the facility do not leave much room for uncertainties in forecasting future airport operations.

Why Hong Kong Airport needed to implement business intelligence project? Because the original system, which was called Airport Operation Statistics System (AOSS) had limited functions and was hard to implement online data analysis. In addition, AOSS did not support ad-hoc query, search functions as well as cross-divisional reporting, which brought inconvenience to staff. Consequently, Hong Kong Airport decided to improve its system by business intelligence.

As for the business intelligence project implementation, it was divided into three major phases: 1) the identification of the user requirements, 2) the analysis of the database and 3) the actual implementation of the new system. During the process of implementation, the project team came up with a number of challenges. At the very beginning, it was about soft skills. Due to the stringent security arrangements at Hong Kong International Airport, project members were difficult to have face-to-face meeting. In other words, communication would be a challenge for them. However, they established a virtual team room to facilitate their collaboration via online video-conferencing, e-mails and phone calls. Second, the project leader encountered some problems when conducting project management. The reason was that the project was six months delayed and several contingency budgets had to be put in place as more resources were required than anticipated. Actually, the project leader should have had adopted some tools and techniques to manage the time, cost and human resource management, e.g. critical path analysis, earned value management and so forth. Third, the project team members also had difficulty in data analysis for the reason that they could only get very limited documentation on the database. Therefore, the project leader had to spend a considerable amount of time and effort in analyzing data structure in terms of quality and sources.

Even though the project team met quite a few challenges, they still sticked to the aims and were dedicated to the success of the business intelligence project. Thanks to business intelligence, the new system - AOSS2, undoubtedly, is a quite efficient and effective functional system in comparison with many other systems.

Generally speaking, companies can make better utilization of the existing big data for making future decisions. Take eBay as a typical example. According to statistics, nearly 89 million people from 29 countries have active eBay accounts, trading over $1,400 worth of goods, every second of every day. With this mount of transactions, tremendous data is being processes on a daily basis, including seller and buyer data, current auction listings, and final sales. For eBay as well as its sellers, this massive amount of data can be a virtual gold mine. In order to maintain customer and seller confidence, eBay is exerting a lot of effort and spending a lot of resources to maintain and improve the integrity of the site through the development of sophisticate business intelligence tools. In response to the illegal activities, eBay has created a research group dedicated to trust and safety; this research group is actively involved in developing data mining systems that learn from historical data so as to be able to prevent and catch fraudulent transactions on eBay. Tellingly, eBay is a successful example to illustrate the essence of business intelligence.

Conclusion

To sum up, there is no doubt that business intelligence will become the trend in the coming days for its high value. Additionally, business intelligence drives the success of companies. With business intelligence, organizations can better utilize the existing data to analyze customers’ needs and thus helping companies to create more suitable products for customers. Obviously, this action can maximize customer satisfaction or even exceed customer expectation. Even though enterprises will encounter various kinds of challenges when implementing business intelligence project, they have to adopt corresponding approaches to overcome those difficulties, acting like the case – Hong Kong Airport Business Intelligence Implementation Project mentioned above.