Data Is The New Oil – It Powers Your Engine Of Survival and Success

Is your organization using the oil you’ve been collecting and storing to power your success or is it just sitting there in a big server of goo?

In many cases, the oil (data) itself is more valuable than the products or services that an organization provides.
Large companies have been taking advantage of this because the efficient usage of data can increase profitability. It can enable insights and actions that lead to increased success. It shows what’s happened and what may happen. It tells an organization how well it’s doing now instead of 6 months after it’s happened. It can open insights into ways to better manage risk. It, above all, shows the organization how the engine is running and how it can improve performance. It’s as important to a company as the people who run it and the customers who support it. Without using the oil of a company to run it and plan for it’s future, it’s just making assumptions and hoping they’re right.

Business Intelligence is the key to opening the gates to the river of data that everyone in the organization needs to be able to use and share. Those organizations that effectively use their data will succeed. Those that don’t will steadily decline as they find it difficult to hire the best and the brightest as candidates will understand that their careers are at a disadvantage in companies that don’t fully utilize data analysis. They understand that they will be able to spend more and better time on getting their jobs done if they have open access to the data of the organization. Instead of building spread sheets and piecing together data, they can use their minds to see and solve problems quicker and more efficiently. They see ways to improve operations and strategic planning in as near to real time as possible instead of trying to scan spread sheets that reflect data that’s many months old. Their companies and their careers become proactive instead of reactive.

Simple examples:

U.S. Xpress Enterprises, a midsize trucking firm based in Chattanooga, Tennessee, recently built
a dashboard that pulls telemetric data from each of its 2,000 trucks every 15 minutes to track
the time they spend idling at rest stops. Armed with this real-time information, executives at
U.S. Xpress implemented new policies and procedures governing truck idling that have saved
the company millions of dollars in fuel costs.

Kelley Blue Book, a veteran publisher of automobile valuations, calculated car
values through a combination of data sampling, industry knowledge and intuition. Seven years
ago, it changed this process, adopting a scientific approach to car valuations that applies mathematical models to large volumes of transaction data that it captures from auction houses and
other sources. Today, Kelley Blue Book publishes new car valuations each week for 53 regions
compared with once a month for three regions using the old process. This transition to a data-
driven approach to car valuations has set new standards for accuracy and reliability and given
Kelley Blue Book a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

What could your company do to increase efficiency or create a new product? Companies like yours need to utilize their oil before their competitors do in order to not only survive but to thrive.

But in the real world oil, like data, is sticky and messy and almost impossible to use in its raw form. It needs to be refined so that its many benefits can be realized.

Does you company have the skills to refine your data? These skills include:

* Dashboards/reports

* Drill paths

* Dimensions

* Queiries/calculations

* Filters/prompts

* Relationships

* Metrics

* Hierarchies

* Attributes

Data Integration

* Data capture

* Data cleansing

* Data transformation

* Data loading

* Scheduling/error handling

Does it have the infrastructure including hardware
(server and storage), a relational database management system (RDBMS), a data model, a variety
of data integration tools and source data connectors, a metadata repository and a variety of reporting and analysis tools?

Your staff may have suffered through months or even years of planning for a new software system. Implementing BI doesn’t have to be like that. It should start small and be done quickly from the ground up so that it’s built to solve problems by those who will use it and grow it. The best solution is always if the users believe it’s their system and not something dictated by management. It also shouldn’t be based on the number of users. A BI system loses it’s real value when it’s limited to only certain employees. Everyone needs to know that they are part of the future of an organization and that they can make a contribution. Access to dashboards so they can look at data and evaluate questions is important not only for strategic reasons but for employee recruitment and retention.

This takes expertise and experience in gathering all of the data and refining it so its available to user generated dashboards based on the way the company does business not in canned analytic pachages from analysts who think the industry works in a specific framework. These canned analytics packages can still be used but it’s important to help your staff understand that this is their system and not a canned package of apps that don’t address their problems or are too hard to modify to do so.

Inteneo Systems provides a turn key cloud based solution that doesn’t require purchasing hardware or software nor the need to recruit Business Intelligence experts. We can take your internal as well as external data and provide it in a form that your staff can immediately begin to utilize. What are the 5 questions that you think your data should answer and can help move your company forward?

Inteneo Systems – Business Intelligence/Big Data Expertise from Big Sky Country

http://www.inteneosystems.com 406-531-8119