Welcome to the second edition of Insights, Information Builders' monthly online newsletter. Our last issue brought requests from many of you to clarify the meaning of the term BI. BI is the acronym for business intelligence, the process of turning data into useful information through the use of reporting and visualization technology. This information can then be used to gain insight and improve decision-making.

For most IT veterans, the old Holiday Inn ad campaign slogan of the best surprise being no surprise has rung all too true. Traditionally, most surprises have been associated with unexpected project complications that led to blown budgets or deadlines.

Yet, when developing operational business intelligence (BI) systems, surprises can have a much better ring. That was the story at TELUS, the Canadian telco firm whose balanced scorecard project measuring field service won the ROI award at this year's Information Builders Summit users conference. Starting as a byproduct of a regulatory reporting effort, the TELUS field service scorecard system scored its fair share of unexpected positive returns.

The context was the need to identify opportunities for improvements to operational and capital efficiency, to address the competitive dynamics of the telecom industry, as well as the negative regulatory impacts, and to bring TELUS' operating cost structure in line with North American industry-leading benchmarks and the competitive marketplace.

Field service, which accounted for nearly 40 percent of the company's workforce, posed a logical opportunity. The initial assumption was that, by increasing the number of completed service calls daily, the company would improve customer satisfaction while better meeting regulatory requirements governing service levels. As an added bonus, these operational efficiencies would save money.

Conventional wisdom for designing this operational BI system would have been to focus on tracking service-call data in aggregate form to get the big picture. However, adding a feature giving field force workers their own scorecard gave them a personal stake. It provided the tools that employees could use to perform root-cause analysis, and thereby improve their own performance. To encourage buy-in, the project team made sure to solicit feedback from line personnel to help design the scorecards that would measure them.

And that's where the positive surprises began rolling in. Because TELUS gave field-service personnel input to the process, they extended the capability of the operational BI system. Now that the data was granular and meaningful enough, the company gained unexpected opportunities for enhancing the bottom line.

For instance, a worker whose scorecard came in below normal was able to attribute the subpar returns to faulty scheduling, which was dispatching him back and forth to opposite ends of town. As a consequence, the scheduling algorithm was adjusted to cluster service calls by locale, thereby saving time and fuel, not to mention producing more satisfied customers. In another instance, the scorecard data was granular enough to pick up unbilled ancillary work, thereby adding $500,000 to the revenue stream.

As a result, the WebFOCUS system is saving TELUS $1 million to $2 million per month. But more importantly, by using a flexible design that provided each stakeholder the tools to track and improve their performance, the company opened itself to unexpected results. While surprise is often a dirty word in IT circles, when you give people the opportunity to get the information they need, the surprises typically turn out to be positive.

Long considered a technical chore that "fixed" the gaps separating two or more systems, integration was conventionally the domain of specialists such as DBAs, application developers, and software architects. At most, the business played roles akin to a customer at an auto repair shop: you explain the problem, place the order, and then wait for the job to come back. The reason was the reality that most integrating jobs relied on custom programming, which tended to keep the job fairly technical.

With commercially available technology and standards eliminating much of the need to "roll-your-own," integration projects are looking more like application development efforts. The result: business representatives are asserting more central roles.

At Alcan, the nation's largest recycler of aluminum, the company recently implemented composite applications covering reporting and analysis of procurement processes, plus an external Web portal for the company's third-party freight carriers. Over a dozen source systems were involved. Instead of throwing the project over the wall to IT, business units focused on process design, working iteratively with IT, which in turn configured iWay adapters and Microsoft BizTalk Server. "Instead of force-fitting users into a solution, we fit the process around our users," explained e-Commerce Manager Bo Foster. Evidently the processes must have fit pretty well, as the company now has a patent pending for the freight rating portion of the app.