| | MARCH 201919CIOReviewBECOMING A BI-(OR ANALYTICS-) COMPETENT ORGANIZATION By Zhongcai Zhang, First SVP & Chief Analytics Officer, New York Community Bancorp, Inc.I have to preface that the terms of Business Intelligence (BI) and Analytics are used interchangeably in this article. I feel like somewhat excused to do so, as the unit I manage has been called Business Intelligence since more than a decade ago albeit its changing organizational affiliations and varying job titles of mine.BI, in essence, is for IB, (making) intelligent business. BI is a critical function for an enterprise in a rapidly changing society whereby consumer needs for products and preferences for service interactions are constantly being shaped by technological advances. BI enables an organization to run routine productions, optimize its processes, discern signals from noises, and craft innovative strategies and tactics along with its products, services, and customers. When done right, it ultimately confers competitive edge allowing a company to reap bottom-line benefits, ranging from reduced operational costs to new revenue streams. Business Intelligence has been around for quite a while. It has certainly progressed in very significant ways, especially in the past decade or so. BI technologies have advanced, the adoption of BI across industries has been more widespread, and the BI function within a given enterprise is nowadays more entrenched. Nevertheless, challenges remain. Over-investment and under-delivery (of a tall promise) are not rare to observe. Lukewarm acceptance and bottle-necked growth are not uncommon to encounter. Organizations thriving on their ever-evolving and constantly-optimizing BI competency are probably still in the minority camp across the spectrum.A BI-competent organization starts with a good reporting environment. Categorically, reporting consists of two types: operational reporting and metrics reporting. The former is largely a data reduction (via various summarizations) process, whereas the latter is a distilling endeavor to transform or synthesize various operational stats into relevant metrics underlying the business performance. The former serves a foundation for the latter, and the latter leverages the former and further helps the former from drowning decision makers. Getting this two-fold reporting right embodies not only a solid data environment, the fulfillment of the prerequisite for BI, but also the proper configuration of the BI tools within a given organizational setting. Operational reporting is indispensable for frontline managers to perform their production-specific functional tasks, and metrics reporting, often in the form of KPI's (key performance indictors) or KPM's (key performance metrics), is a necessity for upper management keeping a pulse on the business while navigating through the competitive maze.Analytics, or predictive analytics, is a logical extension of the reporting prong of BI when cognitive explorations such as why, what, and when naturally become next level of business inquiries beyond reporting. BI can survive on the reporting prong but prospers on both the reporting and analytics prongs. Analytics benefits from not only a good reporting know-how but also the very same data infrastructure underlying the reporting function. When analytics becomes an integral part of an organizational being, it helps impart business insights that inform strategies and tactics with respect to products, services, customers, and processes. In a global economy where competitive advantages are often short-lived, analytics is an enabling agent for enterprises to constantly push the innovation frontier when it comes to product development, pricing maneuvers, market positioning, strategy recalibration, and the like. Organizational competency on analytics is an enterprise asset in every sense. Thanks to the Big Data trend characterized by velocity, volume, and variety, the machine learning branch of traditional Analytics benefits from not only a good reporting know-how but also the very same data infrastructure underlying the reporting function
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