Don DeLoach's CEO Blog

If you haven’t noticed that businesses of all sizes and shapes are having earnings issues you are either very lucky or living in a well-appointed cave.  Red Ink has been the color of the bottom line for many companies over the past 18 months  around the world.  Business leaders are focused on gaining a better understanding of all aspects of their business in order to turn the red ink to black by asking questions such as  “Are changes needed to the product mix? Should we sell through different channels?   What target customer should we sell to?  What is happening in our customer base today, last week, last month, and what is likey to happen tomorrow?”

The need to get answers to these critical questions is the reason that Business Intelligence (BI) and data warehousing tools and technology are growing at fast clip.  In most current IT spending reports you will see BI and data warehousing software spend very high on the priority list.   Yet, an even more important question is, should we define and implement an enterprise strategy or deliver at a departmental level? I believe the decision point is how quickly you can design and implement the solution.
 
The need for immediate answers is driving a resurgence in the implementation of data marts.  Data marts gained attention in the 1990s as a means to deliver business intelligence in an efficient manner for a single department or business unit instead of trying to model and analyze data across an entire enterprise.  The basic idea is to identify the data important to your department or customer segment, set up a container to house the data in an organized fashion, then layer on tools that allow you to review, analyze and track changes in the business in a way that tells you what needs to be done today and tomorrow.  
 
Time is not something you can ever get back.  You must find a way to uncover problems and find solutions quickly.  A basic tenet that has been proven over and over is that any project is best solved a piece at a time.  Smaller scope with shorter term deliverables is always lower risk and more likely to succeed.  Projects that cost 10s of millions and take 2 years to deliver, generally fail.  Why?  Because the market, the problems and the opportunity have all changed before you can ever deliver the solution. Years and even months are too long to wait before setting up a platform to track and analyze your business.  Empowering the department to work with their own data and deliver quickly has to be the right approach.

This also comes at a time when innovation at Infobright is available and can significantly reduce the time and effort to design, implement and manage a data mart.  When you walk through the Infobright website, you see references to “Reducing Database Administration by 90%”, “Elimination of Indexes”,  “Self Managing Database”, “support 100GB to 50 TB”.  These capabilities are what enable the successful implementation of data marts without an army of database developers and administrators.  
 
So, don’t take my word for it, the software is available to the Community User at Infobright.org , and serious enterprise users can get a free trial of the Enterprise Edition at http://www.infobright.com/Products/Product-Demo/ . You will find the solution easy-to-use and the time-to-performance amazing.
 

So, don’t try to boil ocean and certainly do not wait for the big corporate-wide project.  Whether you need to analyze customer web activity, call detail records or track online sales, it can be done quickly with limited skills and investment. The Infobright platform is worth a look.

All the best,

Mark