Thanks again for all the greetings and comments over the holidays, I really appreciate it. Best wishes and success to everyone this New Year 2012.
When we left off last year I was writing about the DB2 business analytics that could help your management understand the growth and hard work your DB2 systems and applications are doing every day and the hard work the Enterprise Architects, DBAs and developers are doing maintaining and growing the systems and applications.
The comments I got over the holidays asked what should an Enterprise Architect or DBA propose or do to catch the attention of management to help them to implement business analytics into the overall enterprise. Designing and implementing many large data warehouses over the years I have been fortunate to employ various analytical approaches. The following three business areas are prime candidates for providing immediate return on investment for your company’s bottom line.
First, the companies that are analyzing their business are the companies that are growing and leading their industries. As I noted in the blog entry, Analytics is the Answer: Two Great IBM MIT Papers (http://davebeulke.com/analytics-is-the-answer-two-great-ibm-mit-papers/), companies go through business analytics maturity phases that help the business grow and improve their market share, profitability and overall operations.
The first and most important place to start is by implementing or verifying the business analytics around your business’s customers. Is your business being effective with its customers? Is it acquiring, growing and retaining its customer base? Simple business analytics around the following areas are effective metrics for your business analytics:
- customer size — small, medium or large business types
- customer business type segmentation
- customer churn (new customers and customers leaving),
- customer behavior
- up-selling and cross selling metrics of your products
Next, how is your company optimizing its operations and business processes, utilizing its assets effectively and maximizing its return on investments? Business analytics around the operational aspects of your business is vital to improving efficiency and being the lowest cost producer. Being able to predict your business, how long it takes to produce your goods and the cost of each phase of production are important metrics. Are your operations improving their efficiency compared to last year? Are the assets used to produce your goods costs raising or getting cheaper? If your company is in health care or pharmaceuticals how effective, time consuming or costly was the treatment for a patient’s condition this year versus a patient last year? What assets were required for the business processes, diagnosis or treatments? All of these areas need business analytics to fully understand and predict the best business outcomes and identify an improving or declining business.
Third, how is your business analyzing its risk and threats to the way of doing business? Retail and financial firms especially, but all types of businesses need to detect and monitor customer fraud. Customer refunds, identification of claim fraud, and defense of web cyber-attacks are all part of your company’s business processes and infrastructure. Business analytics all your channels can be used to measure for business continuity risk and outsider and insider threat analysis.
Wrapping business analytics around any of these areas can start with a simple single SQL statement. I have been fortunate to grow a business analytical process from single SQL statements into complete business analytical departments analyzing many different aspects of retail, health care and financial businesses when I did my first data warehouse for E.F. Hutton years ago. Business analytics is the key to growing every business and as an Enterprise Architect or DBA your perspective, in-depth knowledge of the data is vital for helping your business grow and improve 2012. Start developing your business analytics strategy by getting involved with your management; grow your skills and your company’s business bottom line today.
Also I am beginning to plan my Regional DB2 User Group support for 2012 year. Please send an email to me at moc.ekluebevadnull@evad if you would like me to come and speak or offer a DB2 class at your local user group.
Public DB2 Performance Tuning & SQL Training Education classes in February in Chicago.
Dave Beulke & Sheryl Larsen Chicago February 22-24
February 22: DB2 SQL and Optimization Enhancements by Sheryl Larsen
February 23: DB2 10 for z/OS Performance Training by Dave Beulke
February 24: Two great seminars to choose from
Tuning SQL for Performance by Sheryl Larsen
or
DB2 Performance for Java Developers by Dave Beulke
http://davebeulke.com/db2-performance-tuning-and-sql-training-feb-2012/
Leave a Reply