Jim Ward, President and CEO of Brainsell (www.brainsell.net) released a short but insightful assessment of his take on Business Intelligence recently. In the September 2010 edition of his Sage 90 and 200 newsletter he speaks of BI evolving from a “nice feature to necessity”.
In it he makes reference to the possibility of changing BI into CI i.e. Business Intelligence into Customer Intelligence (Read the full article). He proposes that “your sales and customer services teams will have access to real time, actionable information to make calls when a customer’s inventory runs low, cross sell complementary products, and improve satisfaction.“
To anyone reading this article who has worked primarily in an enterprize organization, you might be thinking, well obviously, but the point is that the author is addressing the mid-sized market which is only more recently awakening to the fact that “BI today is powerful, simple to use, and no longer requires a programmer of technical wizard“.
Also interestingly he uses excellent , practical examples of what BI can do in a customer context when all too often discussions around BI tend to focus on financial reporting. BI is the window to all areas of the business and can be accessible to anybody in a business – and practical examples of how companies can put their data to work, serve to illustrate very powerfully the growing importance of BI for SMB organizations.
