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For  every business in every industry, revenue growth remains the most fundamental indicator of success - and by far the most critical.  Unfortunately, marketplace realities of today’s uncertain economy are making revenue targets harder and harder to reach. To gain focus,  organisations must infuse strategic and tactical decisions with the knowledge necessary to maximise revenue, minimise risk and achieve competitive advantage.

The key to this vital knowledge lies in the mountains of raw data your organisation already collects. By transforming that raw data into actionable intelligence, you create the knowledge you need to implement winning strategies across the entire value chain.

Business intelligence is a key component of the Intelligence Value Chain (IVC), an end-to-end intelligence creation and delivery foundation that transforms raw data into true business intelligence that can be used to improve all aspects of your business. Business Intelligence ensures that the right information is delivered to the right people at the right time so they can make informed decisions that are based on facts and not on intuition.

The first step of the Intelligence Value Chain is the development of an action plan. This assessment helps crystallise and prioritise defined business objectives and leverages informational and technology infrastructures to define jointly derivable returns on investment.

The second step is Extraction, Transformation and Loading (ETL). An important activity to be considered between extraction and transformation is quality data cleanse. By focusing on specific business objectives, one can identify which data is needed and just as importantly, what data isn’t. Data that adds value is that which addresses the business question. This is cleansed, integrated, consolidated and transformed into a useful, reliable source.

The third step is Intelligent Storage. The creation of intelligence from massive quantities of data requires flexible storage architecture options that leverage current databases and hardware, meet existing user needs and also provide avenues for growth. This involves creation of repositories that are optimised for different types of intelligence generation and integrated with each other for consistent information within the enterprise. The Intelligent Storage foundation easily accommodates technology platform changes, the addition of new databases, or changes necessitated by evolving business requirements.

The fourth step is Business Intelligence. This involves information dissemination to all the information consumers within an organisation so that they are empowered to make decisions based on actionable intelligence rather than gut feel. This encompasses customer intelligence, supplier intelligence, organisational intelligence and true enterprise intelligence in the form of key performance indicators.

The fifth and last step is Analytical Intelligence. This  typically involves the use of predictive modeling, forecasting and descriptive modeling techniques. Using these techniques you are proactively empowered to manage customer retention, identify cross  and up sell opportunities, profile and segment customers, set optimal pricing policies, objectively narrow, measure and rank which suppliers are best suited for your needs, minimise purchasing costs, score your suppliers by rating the quality of their goods and services, understand which promotions are most effective and address numerous other organisational needs including fraud detection, failure analysis, predictive maintenance, risk management, demand forecasting and more.

These key steps of the IVC demonstrate unique business value and, if  successively linked, the benefits are compounded to create a robust, powerful infrastructure for producing an Intelligent Enterprise.