Another Business Intelligence blog !? by Steve Czetty

Welcome to my world.  I am embarking on the creation and maintenance of this blog for one very selfish reason.  I believe the collective knowledge of my potential readers significantly exceeds my own, and thus by putting my points of view and knowledge out there for all to see will generate conversation and provide new information that I can use in my day to day activities assisting my clients in the retail, wholesale, and consumer goods space.

I believe that one should only host a blog if they have plenty of opinions and some real experience and facts to back it up.  I have been in the “BI” (business Intelligence) space for most of my adult life.  Long before the term was born, I was working with Fortune 100 corporations addressing the persistent backlog of information requests their IT departments were struggling to clear out.  Although at that time my job was all about creating these reports using the latest Report Writer software, I rapidly digressed from information delivery issues to the suitability and usability of the information being delivered.  Although the volume of data available then paled to what we have access to today, the problems were eerily the same.  It seems that we continue to struggle with the same problems today that were around decades ago.  This is why the number on initiative for 2010 in the various IT Guru predictions was Business Intelligence.  Strangely, it is the same for 2011, although now the word Cloud Computing has entered the conversation. (More on that in another entry.)

So if the problems haven’t changed since the eighties, what are we doing wrong?  Actually, let me assure you that we are not doing anything wrong.  As we go about solving our problems, so do our competitors, thus presenting us with new challenges:  How to get a new edge on them, on the market, on the consumer’s agenda, etc.  Or, how to make it cheaper, faster and still provide something that our ultimate customer is willing to put a credit card down for.

Therefore, my conversations here will look at the issues and approaches we can take to address the business concerns of retailers and at times their suppliers.  Specifically, I am interested in how we can collect, organize and present data in such a way that it will allow management to identify, quantify and react to opportunities and threats.  While this may sound like a grandiose undertaking, the practical barriers to these goals are usually mundane:  Too much, or missing, data;  need for macro as well as micro management information from the same data sources; the integration of heretofore unavailable information that has impact on our business (thing weather forecasts, for instance.)

In the coming weeks I plan to discuss:

• Markdown allowance management for suppliers to the major retail chains;
• The problems of managing markdown strategies, and the surprising fact that the data being collected is often inadequate for making proper decisions;
• CRM for retailers, and why the Boutique chains have all the advantages;

Let the fun begin.  Leave a message, pose a question, disagree (politely, please) with each other and myself. 

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