Communicating Business Value in BI

Today was our first day of classes for the new academic year.  My day started with an 8:00 AM Business Intelligence class.  This is a new class and I'm really excited to teach it this year.  The class size is smaller than I typically teach but creates some great opportunities to interact with a smaller group of students.

Anyway, during class today we tried to define business intelligence.  Along the way I referenced some examples of the type of business problems BI can be used to address.  One of our textbooks for the class provided some great examples of business problems addressed by BI: customer market segment identification, promotion response, lifetime customer profitability, fraud detection, customer churn risk, and customer channel optimization.

These examples provided a great segue into a discussion about business value and IT investments.  Fortunately, the textbook provided several examples of problems related to CRM data that can be directly tied to increased sales or decreased losses.  Using these examples we were able to see how effective BI practices can be quantified into business value.

I really want these students to understand value as a type of metric for their future projects.  In addition to the common triple constraint, IT professionals need to evaluate project outcomes in terms of business value.  Hopefully, having an early start to considering business value in their studies will make value metrics easier to apply once they graduate.