Analytics

Whether you call the tools Business Intelligence or simply Analytics, they all do the same thing. The basics of Analytics (courtesy of IBM) are –

• The ability to gather and use information from inside and outside the company.
• The ability to extract the most relevant information.
• The ability to align information with business objectives across functions.

I've become acutely aware of, and to my dismay, deeply involved with, analytics. My firm recently rolled out a new CRM, one that is web-based. One of the advantages of this new software is the built-in analytics. The concept of extracting relevant information out of whatever software we’ve used in the past is nothing new, but it was so damn hard to do anything using the old on-premise system (last updated in 1998). So our struggles come from learning what we can do with the new CRM while simultaneously trying to apply old processes to the new software. And it doesn’t help that we must go to the vendor for every little change (at least that’s my opinion).

So we, as an organization, are struggling just to get what we want (and in the format that we want to see it in) out of the new CRM. I think the format that the data comes out in is just as important as the data itself. It must be readable to a human in a way that makes sense to the human brain. It is a battle I’m fighting every day.

Rob