SET UP OF A BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
PROCESS
Setting up a business intelligence process in a company is an expensive initiative with a long term return on investment, and not easily quantifiable interests. It is necessary to identify and, generally to re-examine all the circuits of information in the company, to modify the behaviors, the cultures. A successful implementation is not done without a very strong will of the management of the firm. Moreover a specificity of our French culture wants that information is POWER constitutes a very important brake of the exploitation of information.
On the other hand the ignorance of this danger - emergence of new technologies, of new competitors, modification of the lawconstraint - by ignorance or pride involves a loss of competitiveness of the company, can cause simple disappearance.
Unfortunately, the companies which disappears because of this ostrich policy are many, hardly ever in France. My matter is not to quote them here, it is enough to open a newspaper to illustrate my matter.
The installation of the process such as we carried out it - incompletely - at
is unrolled in three stages, last is the tough one.
- Definition of the search criteria : information competes with, techniques, produced, on which market...accuracy of search criteria imply the relevance of information. Two pitfalls : ignoring some strategic fields for the company and noise which makes information not exploitable.
- the choice of the sources of information : to begin with existing information as internal, from sales people first of all, the press, the Official Journals, the patents, the CCI, the CFCE, trade-unions, internet, the external professional data bases...
- implementation of the business intelligence in the company : for this step, according to me, it is imperatively necessary to hire an external consultant. As well as for the quality control, it is difficult to make say in-house where are the dysfunction's. The goal of this audit is to identify the circuits of information, in order to set up a dedicated service in charge of the business intelligence made up of several people relay in the company (marketing, sales, finance, quality, production) and constitution of a schema of processing and diffusion of these data. Training and the sensibilization of the whole of the people of the company and particularly those which are in contact with the clients is compulsive for success.
A great quantity of specialized consultants exists in PARIS. Public organizations or associations like the BRIST, ) 'ADIT , L' INIST, la chambre de commerce de l'Essonne, L 'ADBS, are part of public agencies providing business intelligence advises, following government policy, for free or at low cost.