Customer behaviour key to BI

Everyone in business today is convinced their competition knows something they don't, says international data warehousing guru, Dr Ralph Kimball.

Business desperately wants to understand customer behaviour and they are hoping business intelligence (BI) will deliver answers to questions about their business drivers by management, market, investors and competitors, he adds.

Most business executives, however, are smart enough to know a twinkling dashboard is not the answer. It may look impressive, but it will not deliver insight, according to Kimball.

"There has been a fundamental change in business' understanding and expectations of BI. They are now demanding access to data as they know they need to do their jobs better."

As a result, Kimball expects the demands from business to be far more real and fundamental in 2008. "They will start looking at customer behaviour more closely and this will impact business intelligence and data warehousing (BI/DW) in an exciting way.

"There is so much data available to do in-depth and detailed customer behaviour analytics, but it is not a black box that can simply be plugged into a company's IT infrastructure. Companies will have to start with getting the basics right."

According to Kimball, the key business challenge companies are likely to face when implementing BI/DW is the interpretation that is required to make the systems work - understanding and translating the requirements from business.

At the technology level, integration - the task of bringing all the data in a responsive and simple way to the end-users - is by far the most difficult element, Kimball notes. "What makes this very daunting is the fact that data is scattered all over organisations and the first task is to integrate all data."

Data quality, adds Kimball, will be the next big challenge. "The expectation from end-users is also that the results are available very quickly and they are demanding increasingly operational data in seconds or minutes."

By getting the basics right and with a full spectrum of data and the ability to analyse and report from every corner of the business, the big payoff for business will be rapid innovation (new products, new services, new channels), fast business restructuring and greater market share or leadership, he says.

Kimball will be in SA on 13 November to talk on BI and share his views on: "Data Warehouse - The Platform for Business Intelligence".

This one-day seminar - Straight Talk on Practical BI Techniques for Proven Results - is hosted by Sybase SA's BI Practice, in association with ITWeb.

In his keynote, Kimball will explore the data warehouse as a platform for BI, and touch on data quality - a key concern and requirement for successful BI.