A New Generation of Business Intelligence ? For the Front Lines

[Doha]

A New Generation of Business Intelligence ? For the Front Lines
by Umberto

Business Intelligence (BI) arrived on the scene in the 1990s with a simple and compelling value proposition: we will make your business smarter. Today companies spend $14B/yr[1] on BI, getting a better understanding of their company?s operations and driving improvements and efficiencies. BI has become a required technology for CFOs, COOs and operational management.

Business Intelligence was designed to provide insights to senior management. But today?s companies are rapidly evolving beyond the traditional top-down structures that were most effective in manufacturing. Today, companies strive to empower all employees to collaborate, make decisions, and find ways to improve the business. Using BI to help senior managers make more intelligent decisions is important, but no longer sufficient. Industries of all kinds have changed and decisions must be made more quickly, at every level of the company from the executive suite to the front line. Companies need all their employees to have access to business intelligence to help them make informed decisions, every day.

To address this need, there is a new requirement in enterprise computing: putting intelligence in the hands of all employees. Knowledge is shared across organizations using corporate social networks like Yammer, Jive and Chatter. Software developers use Stack Overflow, Github and FOSSology to share code, best practices and help each other be more effective. Marketers are fed real-time insights on their web traffic by analytic packages like Google and Adobe Analytics, and intelligence about their leads using platforms like InsideView, Mintigo and Infer. And sales people have access to insights about businesses and people, directly in their CRM, through applications like InsideView for Sales and LinkedIn.

The performance improvements that senior management has gained over the last 20 years pale in comparison to the magnitude of benefits that we will gain in the next 10 years as employees are empowered with real-time, relevant knowledge. The scale of this shift is huge (employees outnumber senior managers by 10x or more), and the impact on business performance will be profound. It?s like a living creature evolving from having just sight connected to its brain, to having all its senses feeding the brain information (hearing, taste, touch, smell and sight). We are evolving from having operationally optimized companies to truly intelligent organizations.

This evolution has already been under way in our consumer lives. Today we walk around with a supercomputer in our palm that tells us where we should go, how we can get there, which friends are heading to the same place, and what to buy when we arrive. It's changed our lives as consumers. And the new wave of intelligent enterprise applications is about to change our lives as employees and change the playing field for companies all over the world.

Over the next few weeks, I will dive into an area of this new business intelligence world that is particularly relevant to every organization that sells a product: CRM Intelligence. As companies get smarter about attracting, engaging with and managing customers, they will materially affect the bottom line while making employees more effective and customers more satisfied. In the world of CRM, knowledge truly is power.