Posts Tagged ‘Intelligence’

Business intelligence, defined in other words, is the set of processes, skills, technologies, practices and applications used to support decision-making within a corporate or industrial framework. Prudent executives familiar with this relatively new concept are, more and more, implementing projects to leverage the kind of usable information that supports better decision-making in their own corporations and industries.

New times bring new realities, and thus, new business models and concepts. Business Intelligence, or BI, is one such concept. It’s a new year, a new decade, and in a previously shaky but hopefully on-the-mend economic climate, businesses and organizations in every industry are finding themselves more pressed to find a competitive edge within their markets in order to not only succeed, but simply survive. In 1989 Howard Dresner (later a GartnerGroup analyst) proposed this umbrella term to describe “concepts and methods to improve business decision making by using fact-based support systems.” The term was not popularized until almost ten years later. Its usage is now widespread, but still in its infancy as far as implementation.

Business or competitive intelligence projects can take many forms. Some of these projects might include the implementation of industry-specific analytic applications delivered via software with business intelligence capabilities. According to a paper entitled “Gartner Reveals Five Business Intelligence Predictions for 2009 and Beyond,” by 2012, business units will control at least 40% of their total budget for business intelligence. Other BI projects might include implementing events like summits and conferences, such as through services offered by the Marcus Evans group, to encourage the spread of information and the enforcement of data access for the entire organization.

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Also referred to as competitive intelligence, BI is one model executives and managers can use to help them strategize after they have gathered information – in ways that are ethical and legal – from the external business environment (i.e., analyzing the competition) and converted that information into usable intelligence to help them raise their own competitive standards. It’s important to recognize, however, that competitive intelligence is about more than just analyzing competitors, it’s about channeling data-gathering efforts toward the end goal of making the organization more competitive relative to its environment.

The following are just a few critical factors needed for the successful implementation of a business intelligence system: a clear vision & planning, committed management support & sponsorship, business driven methodology & project management, data management & quality issues, performance considerations, mapping the solutions to user requirements, robust & extensible framework, brain-storming and information gathering. A business event such as those coordinated by corporate hospitality and production specialists at the Marcus Evans group is one such medium which can be highly conducive to the dispersion of such knowledge throughout the ranks of an organization.

First, companies must appoint “enterprise architects” to head up intelligence gathering and analytic efforts. Then, it’s up to decision-makers to form strategies based on this information, ultimately dispersing them through appropriate channels via business events and gatherings such as those offered by Marcus Evans. According to the same Gartner paper previously referenced, through 2012, more than 35% of the top 5,000 global companies will regularly fail to make insightful decisions about significant changes in their business and markets, simply because of lack of information, processes, and tools.

“Business Intelligence plays important role for your business growth”. People know this one but don’t know how? Business intelligence technology provides your detailed information about your business operations such as business data analysis, products sales revenues, data mining, predictive analysis, business performance management and benchmarking.

You can also say business intelligence as competitive intelligence they support decision making techniques for your business. Business Intelligence Software always use data of your business data warehouse not all data but some informal business data coz BI is the process to convert your business raw data in to meaningful information which used for decision making process to your business also it include some technologies such as data integration, data quality, data warehousing, master data management, text and content analytics for data preparations.

Business Intelligence Software is widely used for following business purposes in order drive to business market values:

Measurements of organization’s activities and performance with business goals
Business Analytics includes data analytics, statistical analysis, Predictive analytics, Predictive modeling, Business process modeling.
Enterprise Reporting with Data visualization, Executive information system, and OLAP
Business Data Collaboration for data sharing and electronic data interchange
Knowledge management go ahead with Learning Management and Regulatory compliance/Compliance of your business

Useful Business Intelligence Tools:

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Business Intelligence Software has some important resources which helpful for both customers and business owner to understand business goals and values:

BI Enquiries:- Through this customer can easily manage and personalize their enquiries with multi dimensional environment and summarizing their data in rows and columns.

BI Reports:- You can create, save and update reports for your specific requirements and also make these reports in excel and your desired file types.

BI Dashboard:- It’s like your own dashboard mean, you can brings all of your useful information in one workplace and also you can select some visual tools like gauges, dials or grids for your personalize data.

XL One Reporting:- This reporting tool is not provided by all BI vendors but as per your requirement they offer you. You can present your experience through Microsoft Excel interface with your Business Intelligence Software.

Business ETL:- It is one of the best toolset for collecting, managing , and organizing your informative data. Its abbreviated of Extract, Transform, Load process for data warehousing. It’s collect data from different sources and organizes use this data for other business processes like HR process, Financial and payroll process.

Finally Business owner whatsoever any type of business is and they always think about Business Intelligence. If they want to develop business intelligence software as per their business requirement then they can contact software outsourcing company for desired BI applications.

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Business intelligence enables employees to take prompt decisions depending on relevant and updated information and thus helps businesses to focus better. The synthesis is achieved in diverse fields such as accessibility of information, performance, entirety of information, and flexibility. The task is effectively managed by a business intelligence consultant.

 

Business intelligence enables that deciders on any of the levels can access enterprise information. This means that the company resources are mobilised largely and thus available to people at different hierarchical levels such as managers, business partners, consultants and end users.

 

Business intelligence improves the overall performance and productivity. It relieves the ERP in operation from the analytical tasks, thus leaves scope for legacy capacity, and improves the performance in case of operational tasks.

 

Business intelligence acts as a kind of flexible umbrella thus facilitating the connection between diverse bits of information across different platforms, enabling backend integration tool and thus creating a holistic approach. The connections can be smoothly established between different platforms and severed when the need arises for the same and depending on the present market situation.

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The comprehensive information available to all enables smooth decision-making. Situations that effectively witness the choices are the ones that include distributed and heterogeneous systems, do not contain any harmonious data, and works with considerably high data volumes. These are effective in situations that require product analysis, cash flow management and risk analysis as well.

 

Business intelligence revolves around online analytical processing, benchmarking, predictive analytics, data mining, online analytical processing and text mining. A BI system is thus often alternatively referred to as a DSS or decision support system. It is in fact a subset of competitive intelligence. It utilises applications, technologies and diverse processes for the analysis of structured data, internal and business processes. Business intelligence can be applied to a number of business purposes in order to increase business value. These include analytics, knowledge management, measurement, collaboration platform and enterprise reporting.

 

Business intelligence consultants make use of tools such as Microsoft SharePoint. It is equipped with features such as scorecards, databases, dashboards, business applications that are all intended towards delivering specific needs. It is necessary to consider certain factors before incorporating business intelligence practices into the work process of a company. It is to be used by the people in the organisation in order to add much more value to the work process. The system should have a high usability. In order to make it more user-friendly, it is necessary that its end users be consulted during the initial stages of its development.

 

Specific sectors require business intelligence systems to be developed in a way that meets the functional requirements of the sector. This especially holds true for governmental banking regulations. The information gathered by banking institutions and thereafter analysed with the help of BI software needs to be protected from a certain section and at the same time made available to another group of individuals. It is necessary that business intelligence solutions are sensitive to the requirements of the users and is flexible enough to adapt to the regulations.

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When a lot of people hear me talk about competitive intelligence, I notice a lot of hesitance in their eyes. Not only does it sound too good to be true, but it also sounds dangerous. No one wnats to engage in corporate espionage and because of strict government regulations on corporations no one is willing to take any such risks for fear of being dismantled. The thing is, this shouldn’t be the reaction. Competitive intelligence is in no way illegal. It’s very legal. It’s scary to think that we are so afraid that we don’t see that there is a way to be just as smart, legally.

Think of it this way. There are two pie bakers. Both have their own secret recipes. Pie man number 1 wants to have the upper hand on pie man number 2, so late at night he goes and breaks into the man’s house and steals the secret recipe. He then uses that secret recipe to dominate the other pie man by selling both types of pies at his store. That’s what corporate espionage is. It’s very plainly illegal. You are gathering trade secrets through a clandestine and nefarious manner and using them against your competitor. Now lets try again. Pie man one wants an upper hand over pie man two. So he goes and he buys one of his pies and gets a general idea for how it’s cooked. Then he surveys every customer and gets their opinions on how it’s cooked. Then he looks at who buys pie man two’s pies. He looks at what time they buy it. He gets their opinions on how it tastes. He gathers all the freely available information he can about the way pie man two operates and then pie man one devises a sound business plan to get the upper hand on pie man 2. That’s targeting intelligence.

It’s not about stealing information. It’s about gathering information. It’s not a bad thing at all, however it will give you an almost unfair advantage. So make the switch today and gain that competitive edge you need to succeed.

In Chapter 12 of 17 in his 2010 Capture Your Flag interview with host Erik Michielsen, customer advocacy marketing executive Alan McNab highlights what differentiates a good competitive intelligence program from a great one. McNab cites freshness, noting the importance of keeping sales teams the most informed people in the industry. In addition to fresh information, McNab also notes the importance of implementing feedback processes and systems to gather on the ground feedback from sales teams. McNab holds a BSEE in Electrical Engineering from Santa Clara University and an MBA from Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. He has worked in various technology marketing roles at Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, Motorola, and is now Vice President, Customer Advocacy at NCR based in Dublin. View more videos at www.captureyourflag.com Follow us on Twitter www.twitter.com Like us on Facebook: www.facebook.com
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BI technologies offer current, historical as well as predictive views about business operations. The most common functions of BI technologies are online analytical processing, data mining, reporting, analytics, business performance management, text mining, predictive analytics and text mining.

Business Intelligence extends its support to organizations and aims at better decision-making. Therefore, a Business Intelligence system can also be referred to as decision support system or DSS. The term business intelligence is synonymous with competitive intelligence since both of them support decision-making. In addition, BI utilizes processes, applications and technologies for analysis of structured, internal data as well as business processes. However, competitive intelligence focuses on collection, dissemination as well as analysis of information in the presence or absence of technical support. It also concentrates both on external as well as internal all-source data (structured or unstructured) and information.

Business Intelligence can also be utilized for various business purposes with the aim of driving business value. These include measurements, analytics, enterprise reporting, and collaboration platform as well as knowledge management. Measurement encompasses programs that help in creating a hierarchy of performance metrics as well as benchmarking that provides information to business owners about achievement of business goals. Likewise, analytics establishes quantitative processes for businesses that help them arrive at optimum decisions. In addition, it also helps in carrying out business knowledge discovery. Analytics incorporates statistical analysis, predictive modeling, predictive analytics and business process modeling.

Enterprise reporting builds infrastructure to address to the strategic requirements of a business. It includes OLAP, executive information system and data visualization. Moreover, collaboration platform involves the collaboration of various areas through electronic data interchange and data sharing. In addition, knowledge management makes a company data-driven through various practices and strategies that identify, represent, create, distribute as well as enable adoption of experiences and insights that is business knowledge in the true sense. Knowledge Management also facilitates regulatory compliance and learning management.

There are several factors that are critical to the implementation of business intelligence. These include vision and planning, quality and data management, mapping solutions as per the requirement of users, performance considerations, expandable and robust framework, project management and business-driven methodology.

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Not all companies are aware that within them resides their greatest asset – their customer database. Just like a diamond in the rough, it patiently waits to be discovered and polished. Until then can you view its true value. With CRM Software, harnessing this hidden asset can mean a hefty change for your business.

By using these data in your CRM system intelligently, you gain a competitive edge. This is called Business Intelligence or BI. It is the management of a company’s internal data which involves the extraction, transformation of data so that it comes out as intelligent information. This enables a business make better decisions basing on its own historic information, allowing companies to project possible future trends, thus, not only does a company gain business intelligence but also competitive intelligence.

Forrester Research quotes that “Business Intelligence is a set of methodologies, processes, architectures, and technologies that transform raw data into meaningful and useful information used to enable more effective strategic, tactical, and operational insights and decision-making.”

So, how is Business Intelligence relevant to Customer Relationship Management?

Business Intelligence plays a vital role in establishing a successful CRM system strategy within a company, whereby each and every employee work together to create and maintain the relationship that the company has with each and every individual customer. Business Intelligence can be viewed as a helping tool in enabling your CRM system strategy in your company.

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Business intelligence has some requirements though before you can start improving it. A few of said requirements are:

1. Data Integrity
Start with a clean database. The only way to achieve Business Intelligence is by maintaining data integrity. Filter out information for duplicate entries. Future decisions can be affected just because entries in your database are duplicated. Any errors in data entry or missing data can have far-reaching effects in the quality of information being extracted from the database. It could also mean profit loss. Resolving these inaccuracies can mean a very tedious job of matching one list against another, contacting clients and companies to update contact details, and could be extremely money-costing and time-consuming, but it can provide significant advantages for a company in the long term.

2. Data Collaboration
Proper data collaboration and integration across departments is very important . You may have all the information in your database but that is not enough. Even though all data resides within the company, it may remain un-meaningful or without use if data is scattered across different departments. Proper sorting and integration of information can be greatly benefited by the sales team in terms of delivering individual customer needs and wants. Additionally, it is a must to update data in your CRM software in order to avoid duplication of tasks; avoiding embarrassing episodes for your employees.

3. Data Analysis
A detailed analysis of customer data in your CRM software will generally help you shorten response time to market changes. It will give you insight into their needs and wants, helping you analyse customers’ buying patterns. This will allow you to better align your products and services with your customers’ needs.

Business intelligence also relates to results of daily business decisions and does not merely encompass analysis of data itself. Your CRM Software would help you monitor customer interactions such as past and present purchases, product or service inquiries through buying patterns, etc. This will allow you to keep track of your business performance; giving you the edge to be always on top of the situation, anticipate customer needs and avert customer attrition before it even happens.

Accurate and up-to-date information in your CRM Software will ensure that your marketing team is always in the know, allowing you to pick and target better prospects. Therefore, allowing you to improve marketing campaigns, attain a higher response rate from your campaigns, identify reasons and solutions to address occurrences of customer attrition.

Last but not the least, being aware of external market conditions is essential. Being aware of market trends allows you to react swiftly to possible changes in market trends. Understanding customer behaviour through the use of your products and services will enable your company to improve its service to its current client base as well as to target new business more effectively.

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Business Intelligence Tools are computer-oriented methods that help in extracting, analyzing and identifying business information, such as sales returns by products or other allied incomes and costs.

The latest business intelligence tools help in efficient decision making in business processes. Therefore, they can also be considered a decision support system. Often the words “business intelligence” and “competitive intelligence” are used interchangeably. The reason is that they both help in crucial decision making. Business intelligence tools use innovative technologies, application systems and processes to evaluate internal formatted information and business methods. On the other hand, competitive intelligence assimilates, disseminates and analyzes information by maintaining a newsworthy focus on an enterprise’s competitors.

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The decision that entrepreneurs and organizations need to make here is about a business intelligence approach they should choose. It is important to highlight the method that will not only help in gaining visibility but will also deliver a predictive insight. Businesses often ponder whether to invest in a new reporting procedure or enhance the existing one.

It is important to realize that any tools incorporated in business should result in a harmonious combination of sales, procurement, order fulfillment, finance, accounting and many others. Therefore, enterprises require a holistic business intelligence solution. The BI solutions offered today by service providers have a similar approach. They comprise a comprehensive application system of built-in BI tools that offer role-based and sensitive intelligence for all. It includes the front line, mid level and even top level management and is able to operate in diverse environments.

IDC conducted an extensive study, “Worldwide Business Analytics Software 2010-2014 Forecast and 2009 Vendor Shares,” that highlights that the requirement for Business Intelligence solutions will keep increasing throughout 2014. This report also states that demand and sustained growth of business analytics, Cloud Computing and the emergence of SaaS technologies are motivating BI solutions. Today, end users are more aware of the advantages of BI solutions and business analytics. This is evident from publicized instances highlighting social networking sites, large retailers, intelligence agencies, search engines and other enterprises that create and evaluate huge information.

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Due to advancement in the IT sector and internet, now these valuable documents are in the reach of the general public. Any person skilled in the art can go through various patent databases and after a search can get the patent document of their need. There are different patent databases viz, USPTO, EPO, JPO, etc freely open for the public access. If we go through the patents related to a specific technological area, we will be able to find the lots of information about the life cycle of the technological innovation viz.,

o evolutionary path of a specific technology,

o technological development,

o technological diversification,

o technology merges,

o major players in specific technological area,

o key points of the specific technology,

“The World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) revealed that 90% to 95% of all the world’s inventions can be found in patented documents.”

Patent analysis can reveals very valuable informations, which is not available anywhere. After patent search the crucial part is the patent analysis, and one have to be very concise about their objective of the study. The information in the patent documents can be utilized in different form according to the need and mapped accordingly to get the picture of the entire analysis in snapshots.

Patent data can be used for the preparation of technological landscapes. Logistic mathematics and circle mathematics can be very useful in the plotting of the technological landscape. It can reveal the evolutionary trend of a technology, how it is evolved from a basic technology, along with the period of the technological diversification and its nature. These maps will also give the detailed overview of the merging of the different technologies to give rise to break-through technologies. These types of maps will be very useful for the R&D personals to evaluate the position of their research and technology, and also they will find way to more innovate more advanced and valuable technology.

In the today’s global context firms need to know what technologies can competitors choke easily, and may be attempting to. They also need to know the spaces in technologies where competition is intense, and the areas where competitors are concentrating their IP development and their R&D efforts. They need to be able to track patent acquisition and development strategies and chart out the competitive landscape. To evaluate technology before making any investment decision, firms need to know the pace of patenting activity in the technology, which patents embody fundamental ideas in the technology and how vulnerable the firm’s technologies are to patent infringements. This will give them much needed information in deciding between technology development and technology acquisition.

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The ability to extract relevant information from patent literature is a crucial success factor for anyone involved in technological innovation. The technology mapping technique’s that can be used to transform patent information into knowledge that can influence decision-making.

Patents are an important source of technological intelligence that companies can use to gain strategic advantage. Technology Intelligence is a can be used for gathering, analyzing, forecasting, and managing external technology related information, including patent information. Computational patent mapping is a methodology for the development and application of a technology knowledgebase for technology and competitive intelligence. The primary deliverables of patent mapping is in the form of knowledge visualization through landscape and maps. These maps provide valuable intelligence on technology evolution/revolution, nature of various types of pioneering; big; pure; and emerging players, state-of-the-art assessment, etc.

These types of technological maps will prove to be a valuable multiplier in R&D and commercialization activities, in various ways including the following:

o Developing further insights in response to strategic requirements and policy formulation in the organization

o Forecasting and identifying technological activities and trends in the industry

o Aiding in the visualization of alternative development and growth paths available to the organization

o Enabling pre-emptive recognition and action on potential licensing opportunities

o Identifying prospective partners and clients

o Identify technology discontinuities and areas of opportunities in their chosen technologies

o Monitor and evaluate the technological process of competitors and potential competitors

o Support decisions on foray and investment into particular technologies and sub-technologies

o Surveillance of technological progress of competitors as well as to alert oneself to new entrants to the field

o Spotting of white spaces or opportunity areas within a dense technological domain

o Creative tool to simulate new ideas and create new IP

o Complementing corporate IP filing strategies

o Support technology proposals for large scale national and international level projects

o Support investment and technology due diligence on companies

Patent mapping can be an integral part of IP management. It can uncover valuable information hidden in patents and can provide useful indicators for technical trends, market trends, competitors changes and technological profile and innovation potential of a company. Patent maps are visual representations of patent information that has been mined and aggregated or clustered to highlight specific features. There is a high degree of flexibility in visualization, which may be in the form of time-series or as spatial maps. We provide a more market and technology oriented analysis of the complete set of patent portfolio assets via our patent mapping services. Patent mapping can be used to ascertain the quality of patents with respect to prevailing technology and the extent to which patents affect the technology. This is a valuable input in technology sourcing/development and R&D decisions. Patent mapping can be indispensable for both firms that have an under-utilized patent profile and are looking to license/assign it at the most favorable terms, as well as to firms that are looking at developing patent portfolio strength in a particular technological field.

Mere subject specialization is not enough for this, but analytical thinking and innovations are very essential. Today lots of software resources are available for mapping the patent data, but almost all are confined to bibliographic informations. The machine work cannot be compared with that of human intelligence. Patent mapping requires many skills. First and foremost among these is an ability to understand the complex scientific ideas protected by the patents themselves. Although it is possible to create a patent map by analyzing the relationships between patents without understanding the subject matter, such a map is often useless and needs to be refined by someone who understands the intricacies of the particular scientific discipline that is the basis of the invention. Thus, I expect that the need for people with scientific (and engineering) expertise in the field of patent mapping is on the increase. That’s why today lots of KPO firm are looking for the right individual and there is a huge demand today, which will certainly increase in the near future.

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So I was surfing the web, doing searches and research on how exactly companies do their research to give them the competitive intellginece they need to form eeffective business and marketing strategies. The answer was a bit surprising. Companies are out there using google to find the information they need. They are wasting hours on silly, oft-times fruitless pursuits. What if they could compile all their resources into one tool? With targeting intelligence such a possibility is available- but first, let’s look at all the resources they use, so we can get a full impact of how obsolete such methods are in the face of the superior targeting intelligence.

Often times we see companies using search tools like search engines or meta crawlers to get their competitive research done. If you’ve ever tried to google for such information you know just how frustrating and slow it can be.
Another trick they’ll try is to contact industry experts and ask for counsel. Again, a waste of time. How did they get their information? How can you trust their information? How can they possibly know everything that is relevant and important for you to know?
Find competitors online- You see this a lot too. Companies will go out and poach the websites of other companies that are in competition with them. Another waste of time. There is a tool that can not only do this for you, but they can accumulate a massive amount of data from around the net and compile a perfect report for you.
Research reports- expensive. Time waster. Research reports could be good if you have the analysis skills to draw good from them, but they aren’t tailored to you. And if you hire on a research team well… Let’s just hope you have the resources and time available to sustain such a move.

The thing is, all of these steps. All of these objectives AND more could be met if you just sign on with a competitive intelligence platform. Using advanced algorithms and cutting edge techniques they can bring you up to competitive speed instantaneously, and give you the information you need to have an almost unfair advantage over your competitors.

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In most of the organization the data mining combined tool with a business intelligence has made the administrative processes very easy and decision system very much accurate. Whatever be the process either for research of competition or abstracting the data from various resources to make in use of business or developing an idea of improving customer organizing relationship. This first releases the load of staff which makes them think independently and create new ideas. Making use of various latest application and tools it enables the user to take right decision of the process.

The sole reason for the application of business intelligence in any of industry is to facilitate the user and centralize the process so that it can be triggered from a single point. Including a wide range of application along with web technologies enables the business intelligence to take control of various data and databases spread over different platform. These facilities has made the business intelligence as one of the mostly used and important process in organization.

The business intelligence is generally termed as decision support system by organizing peoples because making use of its applications and technologies not only speed up the decision process but also give advice on a better solution to a problem. We can compare the business intelligence with the competitive intelligence as BI uses the advance application and web technologies in order to create the decision where as competitive intelligence use the data to analyze and relate within them.

If we see some of the example of Business intelligence services which are mostly used so we will find Excel as top of them it not only facilitate the business like finance and data mining but also gives the user a better and easy way to access that. The tool is so simple and easy to use that a novice can also use it without any hassle and take very good results from them.

Some other tools like OLAP and Data mining tolls are also the key part for making Business intelligence a success. Where the OLAP helps in finding co-relation in between the data and Data mining to point out Result specific data these three tolls combined made it super effective tool.

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