Business Intelligence requires the Freshest Ingredients

Business Intelligence systems have, for the most part, been dreary failures. But not in the restaurant industry.  There, the payoffs have been significant.  So what have you been doing wrong?  And what are they doing right?

So says Merideth Levinson in an article for CIO magazine, The Brain Behind The Big, Bad Burger And Other Tales Of Business Intelligence.

The article tells the story of how the burger chain, Hardee's, used BI to identify a gap in the market.  Despite the heightened awareness of healthy eating, Hardee's BI system identified that Americans would have the appetite for a Monster Thickburger, providing more than 1,400 calories and an artery-clogging 107 grammes of fat.  But what caught my attention was the emphasis put on the need for any BI initiative to be underpinned by quality data.

The key to getting accurate insights from BI systems is standard data. "Data quality remains a very overlooked issue in business intelligence, but a massive one," says Gartner's Friedman. "I continue to see failures due to a lack of attention to data quality." Data is the most fundamental component of any BI endeavor. It's the building blocks for insight. Companies have to get their data stores and data warehouses in good working order before they can begin extracting and acting on insights. If not, they'll be operating based on flawed information.