Helping Managers Tell Stories—Generating ROI from BI

Managers are storytellers. They tell stories about their products, markets and competitors, about suppliers, costs, and profits. They then use these stories to help them make decisions. The stories help them communicate with their bosses, peers, and subordinates and provide the rationale for decision making. For an example see Sales at a Specialty Manufacturer.

Business intelligence data provides some of the raw material managers use to create a story about their business. Sales by product, by channel, by month, errors per 1000 transactions processed by day, and days receivable by customer segment are examples of data used by managers to create stories.

How can the concept of managers as storytellers help an IT manager build a BI solution? Here are some ideas:

• Focus your BI initiative on a specific group of managers and a specific business process (e.g., providing sales pipeline data to the VP Sales and regional sales managers).

• Ask the managers to tell you about their business strategy and drivers of success. This information will provide insight into the managers’ business environment. It will provide the context to help identify the data and tools that are important to these managers.

• Identify the available data. Now that you have some context, take a look at the transaction data that is being collected that could be useful to these managers.

• Work with the managers to identify some initial data needs. Think in terms of measures and dimensions. Sales in dollars and units are measures. They can be viewed along multiple dimensions (e.g., an industry and company dimension, a time dimension, and a product type dimension).

• Provide managers with the ability to navigate through the data and drill down. To stir excitement around BI, the manager needs to uncover an opportunity or deficiency (e.g., sales through distributors are down this month) and determine why (e.g., sales through a major distributor were off 50%).

• Start small and grow. Make an initial data set and provide a simple tool (e.g., Excel) and let the managers do some analyses. This should be a ‘one-off’ exercise. The data feed should not be automated until you have let the managers use the data.

• Look at the analyses that the managers do. Learn how the manager turns the data into stories. This will help you determine what additional data the managers need.

• Presentations are the key to telling stories. The data can best be presented in a PowerPoint presentation. Managers are increasingly turning to Mekko Graphics to increase the power of their presentations.

Here are two problems to avoid, to increase the probability that the BI initiative will be successful:

• One of the biggest dangers of a BI initiative is scope creep. Avoid scope creep by limiting the information a manager can see. If you ask managers in a sales and marketing group what data they need from a CRM system, they will ask for everything—sales figures, leads in the pipeline, campaign information. BI initiatives should be focused. In the example above, sales figures would be one initiative, while leads in the pipeline, and campaign information would be two other initiatives.

• Keep in mind that not all data must be computer-based. A manager will do some data analysis to identify a problem and then might call a colleague in the field to find out why the problem occurred. BI initiatives can add a great deal of value even if they don’t provide all the data the managers need. Apply the 80/20 rule—provide the 20% of the computer-based data that provides 80% of the benefits to the managers.

Managers as storytellers can be a powerful metaphor. It can help you develop a process for delivering successful business intelligence initiatives.