Whenever we talk about Business Intelligence the first question is “What is the Return on Investment (ROI)” – the answers is we don’t often know up front what the payback will be and where in the organization it will come from. What we have tried to do in this short presentation, which is also available in video format, is look at other organizations that have been successful to see what areas paid dividends.

1. Where does Business
Intelligence pay dividends?
Business Intelligence, if you get it right, gives you the
chance to improve your organization significantly – but
improvement means change and that isn’t easy to achieve.
Norman Manley – Decision Support Systems

2. Where does Business
Intelligence pay dividends?
HIPAA
Basel II
Tabaksblat
SOX
 Loyalty programs
 Profitability
 Buyer behaviour
 Special offers
Legal considerations and Fraud
 Identity theft
 Anti-Money Laundering
 Fraud prevention
 Criminal information
 Performance Management
 Business Controls
 Mergers and Acquisitions
 Supply Chain Efficiencies
Accountability and compliance Customer knowledge
Business Performance
 Risk Management
 Information misuse
 Privacy
 Compliance to rules
 Risk Management
 Information misuse
 Privacy
© Decision Support Systems 2014

3. Accountability and compliance
 Compliance to rules – It is the managers job to ensure that
their organization meets international regulations. Failure to do
so may result in losing their jobs or even legal penalties (jail)
 Risk Management - to minimize, monitor, and control the
probability and/or impact of unfortunate events
 Information misuse - it is the job of the law to curb the misuse
of information and protect individuals and companies from the
disclosure of confidential information
 Privacy - The right not to be subjected to unsanctioned invasion
of privacy by the government, corporations or individuals is
part of many countries' privacy laws.
Where does Business
Intelligence pay dividends?
Wall Street Journal June 23 2014 - BNP Near
Settlement With U.S. for Up to $9 Billion fine
http://online.wsj.com/articles/bnp-near-settlement-with-u-s-for-up-to-9-billion-1403483369
© Decision Support Systems 2014

4. Where does Business
Intelligence pay dividends?
 Loyalty programs - loyalty programs should offer incentives for
customers to reduce their switching to other vendors by offering
them better service and better value.
 Profitability - many organizations have both customers and
products (services) on which they consistently lose money. This
can be a strategic choice but in most cases they don’t even know
it is happening.
 Buyer behaviour - is the decision process and acts of people
involved in buying and using products and services
 Special offers - a product, service, or programme that is offered
at reduced prices or rates. It is important to offer the customers
a special offer that is relevant to their requirements
Who is my customer and what do they need?
Using information (BI) to better understand what products
and services the customer wants and why they buy from you
is essential to the success of any organization. It is almost
impossible to do this well unless the information is available
© Decision Support Systems 2014

5. Where does Business
Intelligence pay dividends?
Is anyone in the organization breaking the law?
 Fraud prevention - is the proactive identification and removal of the
causes and factors enabling fraud. It starts with identification of
“unusual” transactions
 Identity theft - is when your personal details are stolen and possibly
used to commit fraud. Currently we store (too) many personal details
about customers it is essential that we ensure that they are secure
 Anti-Money Laundering - measures taken to avoid misuse of the
financial system, including terrorism financing, tax evasion and evading
of international sanctions. We often use analytics (pattern recognition)
to discover these activities.
 Criminal information- the evidence that a criminal act has been or is
being carried out. This type of information is used to stop criminal
activity within an organization or can be used in the prosecution of
criminals.
Using information (BI) to discover possible criminal
activities by analysing dubious data and transactions
often using pattern recognition and checking if the
reported numbers match what is happening.
© Decision Support Systems 2014

6. Where does Business
Intelligence pay dividends?
Do we know how well the business is performing?
 Performance management - a technology for managing
both behaviour and results, two critical elements of what
is known as performance, requires the setting of goals and
monitoring to see if the goals are achieved
 Business controls - are a system of scrutinizing and
approving administrative and accounting processes within
an organization to ensure that the organization is
administered in a proper way.
 Mergers & Acquisitions - deals with the buying, selling,
dividing and combining of different companies and similar
entities that can help an organization grow rapidly, these
entities almost always have different information systems
which need to be consolidated into one source of the
truth.
 Supply Chain efficiencies - a system of organizations,
people, activities, information, and resources involved in
moving a product or service from supplier to customer
often contains bottlenecks. Identifying and removing these
bottlenecks requires constant monitoring of the internal
processes
Using information (BI) to find the
internal bottlenecks by analysing the
performance of the various constituent
parts can lead to huge improvements in
business performance and much lower
costs.
© Decision Support Systems 2014

7. Where does Business
Intelligence pay dividends?
What is the Return On Investment (ROI) - almost certainly the question that is asked most
when discussing the feasibility of Business Intelligence initiatives – the answer is generally that
we don’t know! The four areas shown above are most likely to pay dividends, but beware the
“profit” may not be what you expect, many of the issues made visible by the right information
(fraud, bad products, inefficiency) are not necessarily what you wanted to see.
© Decision Support Systems 2014