Profile

Our innovative Business Intelligence services bring together a deep understanding of the business and technology dimensions of an organization to harness information to improve decision making, financial management, regulatory compliance and customer service.

Our suite of information strategy, data warehousing, data mining and information analytics services measure, analyze and optimize business performance across the entire enterprise.

An organization's ability to access, share and use information is critically important if high performance is their goal. Known collectively as “Business Intelligence,” the ability to collect and analyze internal and external data can dictate how well an organization can generate knowledge and, ultimately, value.

Overview

Business intelligence can help organizations achieve higher levels of performance by:

• Providing insights that can help pinpoint new revenue-generating opportunities and improve operational efficiencies and visibility across the organization.
• Optimizing the return on existing business and IT investments such as data management, data mining, customer intelligence, customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning technology.
• Achieving greater compliance with government and regulatory guidelines.
• Enabling faster problem-solving and decision making at the strategic, operational and tactical levels by internal and external users.

Why iSource

iSource is meeting the growing market demand for Business Intelligence and data warehousing solutions with an array of innovative business and technology services, capabilities and experience designed to meet our clients’ information needs, now and in the future.

iSource Business Intelligence Services offers tailored solutions that address the data challenges that large organizations face. Often, organizations try to implement point solutions, which results in pockets of data being housed in multitudes of platforms, applications and databases that are scattered across business lines, business functions and geographies. This data is often stored in different ways—either in structured, unstructured or digital media formats.

When working with clients to determine their information needs, iSource takes a holistic approach, reviewing the entire organization, assessing a client’s current situation and working to understand the technical investments that have been made to date. Once these steps are complete, iSource create roadmaps that define the technical, strategic and data architecture that will enable better access to data and faster decision making.

Our team of Business Intelligence professionals will collect an organization's internal and external data; store it, typically in a data warehouse; and save it in a usable format dictated by enterprise data governance principles. Once the team accomplishes these steps, organizations can measure, analyze and use the data in a proactive manner. Analytics can be generated. Executives can make critical, strategic decisions faster factual and accessible data. Subsequently organizations can move forward faster, instigating change, reinforcing strategic imperatives or boosting investment.

Specific Services

Integrating best of breed technology from leading software vendors and alliance partners, iSource can offer a comprehensive set of services designed to help clients measure, analyze and optimize business performance across the entire enterprise in order to improve decision making, regulatory compliance, financial management and customer service.

iSource Business Intelligence services include:

• Business Intelligence Diagnostics
• Custom Data Warehousing Services
• Large Warehousing Services
• ERP Data Warehousing Services
• Advanced Business Intelligence Delivery Services

In addition, iSource has customized parts of its offering to address industry-specific standards or business functions. Examples of these standards and business functions include:

• Customer Insight
• Information Insight
• Claim Components

Customer Insight

For most Sales & Marketing driven institutions, customer relationship management (CRM) is not new. Many have already made significant CRM investments, especially in customer interaction providing standardized, high-quality service interactions, and in customer value analyzing the relative profitability of customers.

But there is a relatively new area of focus within CRM called customer insight in which leading Sales and Marketing groups are beginning to invest, and for good reason. Customer insight is the key that unlocks the value of CRM data. It allows Sales & Marketing groups to identify their most valuable customers and high-value prospects and to take action on these insights. For example, customer insight can inform a customer interaction with real-time access to that customer's Internet activity, account history, demographic profile and externally acquired behavioral data. It enables a representative to highlight offerings specifically targeted to individual customers.

Research and revenue monitoring systems indicate that customer insight investments are well justified; with return on investment (ROI) figures as high as 65 percent are not uncommon.

Customer Insight Defined

Customer insight creates a unified conversation that spans marketing, sales and service and reaches across media, from the Web to voice and print. It has five basic components; each plays an integral role in creating value from customer conversations.

These components are:

• data gathering
• data analysis
• optimization
• campaign management and personalization.

Most Sales and Marketing driven institutions already have significant data gathering and data analysis capabilities. Implementations of the other three components, optimization, campaign management and personalization, are more recent, as innovations have enabled S&M institutions to closely link data investments with customer interactions and ultimately with dollar value. In effect, these components unlock the economic value in data warehouse investments by doing the following:

• Optimization allocates finite marketing resources across a large number of customer, product and channel combinations.
• Campaign management plans, coordinates and tracks customer campaigns.
• Personalization tailors content to create customized "conversations" with clients, across channels and customer contacts.

Unlocking the Value

The key to unlocking this value is the integration of customer insight components using a closed-loop system. Connecting data gathering and data analysis with optimization and campaign management enables S&M institutions to determine which customers to engage and how to converse with them for the greatest returns. These investments facilitate informed conversations which, guided by personalization, are more likely to elicit desired responses and maximize value from interactions.

Customer Insight's Economic Value

Let's take a closer look at how customer insight can create value. The typical economic drivers are:

• Increasing the number of desirable customers
• Increasing sales per customer, either of existing products and services or new ones, through cross selling
• Decreasing customer acquisition, servicing and administrative costs through extended efficiency
• Lengthening of the duration of relationships.

Which of these value propositions a company pursues depends upon its strategic position and the maturity of its market, as well as the relative value of its profitability and products. Incumbent companies with a large customer base in an established market usually choose to raise sales per customer and lengthen the duration of relationships. In contrast, new entrants and companies in high growth industries generally seek to expand their customer base. Both can achieve cost savings through innovative campaign management and optimization tools, which speed processes, increase overall capacity, and enable more targeted campaigns, thus conserving resources that would otherwise be wasted on unreceptive targets.

Steps for Customer Insight

Three-Stage Process to Customer Insight

This sequence and investment model in each stage offers the possibility of a significant return on investment.

Stage I: Data Gathering & Analysis

Recent advances in data gathering and analysis have sharpened customer insights, allowed interactive marketing on inbound calls, improved data accuracy and increased specificity of information. Most Sales and Marketing departments have already implemented Stage I.

Stage II: Optimization & Campaign Management

Campaign management has evolved into a highly automated process that tests alternatives and tracks campaign performance. Stage II investments have mainly involved optimization, more specifically the resolution of tradeoffs between customer desires and company objectives and the simulation of the financial performance of marketing, sales and service activities.

Stage III: Personalization

Personalization captures the attention of customers by engaging them in a dialogue that maximizes value for both the customer and the company. Personalization tools are expanding rapidly from individualized Web pages and call center interactions to products and services tailored to the customer.

Sales and Marketing groups that invest in customer insight can unlock economic value from their past investments and achieve significant measurable returns. The ability to benefit from customer insight extends to both new entrant firms seeking to build a customer base and incumbent firms wanting to maximize the value they obtain from their existing base. These improvements are possible because customer insight permits Sales and Marketing groups to converse with individual customers and prospects in a way that maximizes value for both parties.

Implementation

Large Data Warehouses, Small Budget

Today, competitiveness = speed + accuracy. If an organization is going to move effectively to keep pace with market trends and stay competitive, it needs to quickly gather and analyze relevant facts from its value chain and use that information to make better decisions. Moreover, it needs to make this happen as cheaply as possible, especially if it is budget-constrained.

The Position

To succeed in today’s competitive environment, management needs real-time access to relevant information that must often be aggregated from across the business landscape. Often, the available data cannot answer management’s questions such as, “What is the availability and use of a company’s assets and the profitability of its activities?”

Typically, getting specific answers requires making a formal request to the IT department. Then, the IT department has to search for data through disparate sources and consolidate the information into one view. The final challenge is in applying the proper analytics to the data to deliver meaningful insight. Thus, a request of this nature could take weeks or months to complete.

Analysis

Complex, distributed data management challenges require a different data delivery approach that produces results quickly. This approach uses small, iterative cycles to deliver results in a relatively short time to meet business demands for management information, while not sacrificing data quality or compromising the best principles of program management and design.

Recommendations

There is hope. Budget-constrained and information-starved organizations can follow several key principles to optimize their data delivery programs.

1. structure their information requirements in a manner that helps manage the project
2. standardize the data and the granularity of the data extracted across all sources by subject area
3. distribute data extraction to the source systems

Organizations with large and complex data integration issues can benefit greatly because

Outcome

iSource’s Business Intelligence Framework provides a roadmap for building solutions that can scale quickly, by using proven technologies and our access to a broad network of technology providers. Our technical platform for Integrated Business Intelligence provides flexible, end-to-end solutions you can use to turn information into action. The platforms include:

• Microsoft .NET Enterprise Servers and custom solutions for e-commerce and enterprise systems.
• Microsoft SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server Analysis Services for data management.
• Microsoft Office XP applications and technologies for analysis and reporting functionality
• XML and Interoperable Data definitions permitting the salutation between otherwise complex and indifferent data sets.