I is for Intelligence

	Gerald D. Cohen President Information Builders

Long long ago, in the deep dark tangles of Africa, four explorers stumbled upon an elephant on a moonless jungle night. Unable to see, the men began groping about to try to discern what they had found.

"It is a large snake," declared one, feeling the trunk.

"No, I believe it is some sort of rare tree," said another, reaching around one massive leg.

"It feels like a wall of stone," said the third, touching the broad side of the beast.

"No, indeed it is a marble column," exclaimed the fourth, as he felt the smooth hardness of an ivory tusk.

Then a fifth man entered the thicket carrying a bright lantern that illuminated the scene. All of the explorers jumped back in amazement as they realized that these disparate elements all belonged to the same animal.

Assertions about providing good customer service are so ubiquitous they have almost become clich'. But far too often, the various departments within a company fail to adequately serve customers because they cannot see the complete picture of that customer's relationship with the business. The parable of the elephant illustrates the crux of the problem: maintaining complete, up-to-date information across many departments is extremely difficult because there are so many different systems, each with its own data sources and presentation mechanisms.

Think about your own company. Everyone touches information. Senior executives generate reports to analyze the most profitable directions for the firm. Sales managers are concerned with meeting sales quotas and growing the business in new regions. Engineers want to access current design specs and supplier information. Support people need to know how products are actually being used. Shipping clerks need to decide how much packing material to order, or which couriers to do business with.

All of these decisions depend on information – information that is accessed, integrated, and distributed in a meaningful fashion. How easily and consistently can you share financial results with managers? How effortless is it for customers to learn which configuration options are suitable for which products? How often do your sales and support teams work in concert when a new product is released or an old one is updated?

Today's companies are judged not only on the quality of their products and services, but on how well they share information with customers and business partners. As the enterprise becomes better integrated, it is easier for all parties to obtain the information they need – and to make the most of each customer interaction.

We've coined the term i-business to refer to an Internet-driven organization that uses information in an intelligent fashion. I-businesses are organizations that have figured out how best to leverage the network to deploy information consistently and accurately, both inside and outside of the firm. I-business doesn't replace e-business. Rather, it is a critical part of an overall e-business strategy.

While they may not use this exact terminology, most companies are striving to become i-businesses. An i-business has more productive employees, more responsive management, a tighter supply chain and better relationships with customers. It understands how each customer interaction affects all the other customer "touch points" throughout the organization.

The more widely available customer information is throughout the enterprise, the more valuable it becomes. When a marketing department has accurate data about the installed base of products and services, it is better able to develop targeted promotions. When Sales knows a customer's service history, it is more likely to propose the right products. When Service knows a customer's order cycles, it is better able to recommend the right service level agreements or service schedules.

It all depends on technology, particularly as IT folks spend more and more time helping their companies automate both front-office and back-office activities. Technology drives the entire manufacturing, sales, and support cycles and the synthesis of technology with traditional front-office activities has spawned an entire new discipline, commonly called customer relationship management (CRM).

One of the primary tasks of CRM is to understand customers, both their motivations and their buying patterns. You can't assume that customers will buy your products or services just because you have made them available on your Web site. People are driven to make decisions. The point of influence comes at the point of transaction. That means you must be able to analyze customer behavior and supply pertinent information right then and there, at the point of sale.

Integration is the key – another important "i" word. But few companies have achieved truly integrated information systems. In the mainframe world, the client/server world, and even the ERP world, processes are usually built around collecting data and transactions, then worrying about analyzing the information later. Today, with concepts like one-to-one marketing and CRM, you need to be able to analyze your business on the fly. An i-business is able to quickly detect shifts in the market – identifying new patterns in response to a promotion, for example. The goal is to drive closer and closer to a real-time look at customer and sales activity.

This constant craving for real-time knowledge about the business puts tremendous pressure on IT professionals. Analysts that were formerly satisfied with weekly reports now get impatient if they can't get 24-hour reports. They look at morning data in the afternoon so they can change their strategy slightly for the next morning.

Which brings us back to the crux of the problem: usable information is hard to define. Most organizations have deployed individual information systems that serve very specific functions. These stove-pipe information systems sequester customer information in one department from customer information in another, making it difficult to achieve a panoramic view of the overall workings of the enterprise. You end up with a constantly shifting, disparate environment. Somewhere in there is usable information to help customers make decisions, managers meet quotas, engineers advance the capabilities of the firm. The challenge is to simplify the process of getting it and sharing it with people both inside and outside of the organization.

That's where we come in. As we enter the new millennium and celebrate the completion of our 25th year in business, we've done a lot of soul searching to figure out precisely what our core competency is. We've listened to analysts and consulted with customers to better understand the true value we can provide. In the end, our core competency comes down to two important and interrelated abilities: the ability to get at any type of data, and the ability to analyze and present that data as usable information. These two very important capabilities are the foundation of an i-business.

There are lots of data access vendors that have limited experience with reporting and analysis. And there are plenty of decision support vendors who don't specialize in data access and integration. We excel in both areas and are working hard to improve that synergy. For example, we're the only vendor that can provide best-of-breed interfacing capabilities to relational, legacy and ERP systems. That doesn't mean just accessing the data, but staging it and migrating it to sophisticated data warehouse solutions, then presenting it in a useful form that suits each user-whether that implies a self-service Web app, a windows desktop, a printed document, a spreadsheet, or even a handheld communications device.

Our i-business solutions are helping Ford Motor Company share all of its warranty information with dealers online. This has a huge impact on Ford's business, helping its dealers at the local level to better manage relationships and track service preferences. Microsoft and Lucent use our i-business technology to present timely, accurate financial pictures to managers and stockholders. Every transaction at FedEx gets analyzed with our Web reporting technology so analysts know where to establish package drop points based on day-to-day shipping activity.

I call these companies i-businesses because of their ability to use information to drive their key operations and business processes. They have learned how to leverage the Internet to gather knowledge, streamline the flow of information, and integrate diverse data sources in a meaningful way.

Gerald D. Cohen is the president and founder of Information Builders in New York.