A reliable BI system increases the business intelligence - a PM story

This is an entry for documenting what I recommend to address a systematic problem in my internship organization. To avoid the concern about the disclosure of sensitive data and situation, the organization title refers to ABC institution in following description.

Background:
ABC institution is a business school who provides the international executive education and business consulting service.

Although ABC’s main product is imaginable product, I still can see a product as a set of activities including 4C (contact, consult, composing, until closing the deals after delivering the courses.).

As the challenges mentioned above, the report suggests tackling those problems by CRM system and knowledge management system. While the systems are the tool to accelerate the effects, they should be underpinned by following main concept.

1) A customer centricity and service to turn “push marketing” into “pull marketing”
The original way we are using right now is a “push marketing”, which means we push the information to our clients, hoping they accept our offers. The idea of the customer centricity is that we boost the sales by raising clients self awareness, providing a central dashboard for each client, showing the information about how competitive they are, in terms of the employees’ talent by converting the total amount of courses the clients (both corporate accounts and individual accounts) have taken compared to the benchmarks in the same industry they have taken. By doing so, the clients would check whether there is lack of some specific knowledge or whether they under the average within same industry, and checking their knowledge inventory. The comparison will raise clients’ awareness or stimulate their human resource planning in a long run. The dashboard will designed to send the core competency reports by a certain period to remind clients’ human resource stuff to increase their business and employees talent by purchasing the ABC institution’s programs or contact with our product managers. Therefore, we are turning “push marketing” into “pull marketing”.

2) A reliable BI system increases the business intelligence
Since the core competency of ABC institution is knowledge intensive, Knowledge management is the key to maintain its competitive advantages. We can use knowledge management to help ABC institution more effectively create, capture, synthesize, deploy, share, and reuse organizational knowledge by a set of activities aided by information technology infrastructures. However, the building of knowledge database is time consuming and could not take place in a single period time; it requires a continually inputs from all employees. Therefore, the report suggests that to design an encyclopedia, storing all information, including key program, new products, and advertising campaign details.
Further, this system can be connected with CRM system as well; for example, after the representative fulfill the questions, the report can be sent to customers by email, leaving a very clear message.

3) Automations to reduce the product leading time and unnecessary people error
The essential factor to implement the automations is to digitalize every single data. The best way to achieve this goal is to have the digital inputs in the very beginning. Although ABC institution has introduced the intranet, some of the information still needs to be keyin manually such as the enquiry from callings. To solve this situation and to connect with other suggestion mentioned above, we can initiative the digital inputs from the business leads, both the leads generated from online inquiries, offline seminars, and clients referrals.

4) Knowledge managementto reuse the developed knowledge and, to increase FDC’s business intelligence automatically
ABC institution is a place bound with lots of brilliant people, producing the knowledge and business solution all the day even the operation itself keeps producing business intelligence as well. However, those knowledge is scatted everywhere, moreover, no process to record those intangible assets automatically, in result of less utilization of ABC institution’s assets. To address this problem, the knowledge management is recommended to apply as the supply chain management for retailers. For example, first, to input the existing data such as the competitors portfolios, seminar performance documents in a systematic way, the KM system then automatically prioritizes solution documents based on "usefulness-frequency of use" in resolving specific problems; the higher priority ones rise to the top of the list. The automatically prioritization can apply to both customers service receiving the callings and the product managers developing the programs for companies. In the result of prioritization, the knowledge can be shared and improved by different people (a good example is Wikipedia and the economic emerging due to Wikipedia); further, the “most frequency questions”, “the most popular/ useful/ common business solutions” will be read, applied, updated as well so that FDC shaped the (the best practice would be Google’s searching ranking methodology that weights the ranking of most popular web pages based on users, surfers’ clicks, assuming that the web pages which earn the most clicks imply the most useful web pages for certain keywords.
In general, the one effective way to build what every reliable BI system needs- a single version of the truth; therefore, to create a data warehouse, a central repository that is fed by various systems of the company (mailing list, sales, alumni portfolios) and reflects a definitive picture of what is happening is the most essential element.

Modeling the New Procedures
This report is an initial study for internal communication improvement. Although the intention is original form couple divisions, it extends the scale that embrace the whole organization; further, the completed implementation can improve not only the internal communication but also increase the business intelligence. Moreover, by highly utilize the knowledge assets, reducing the service lead time and so on, ABC institution can build the foremost competitive advantages; for example, “providing solutions in 7 days”, “monitor your business intelligence in real time”.

1. Providing solutions in 7 days.
Since the problems in companies are inclusive in couple aspects such as “internationalization”, “marketing”, “finance” and so on. We can document the solutions that we already developed for reusing it on the similar case so that we can reduce the lead time of delivering products.

2. Monitoring your business intelligence in real time.
When our system is designed for customer-centric, every companies or individual can have an account which records what kind courses that have been taken, and how competitive you are in terms of knowledge capability and so on.
The member also can see other companies’ record as the benchmarks.
Those two functions would build the core competency as well.

Implementation
To implement this project, it requires a experienced IT vendor to support the equipment, developing, and maintenance. To choose the ideal vendor, I recommend either outsource to the original vendor who support ABC institution’s existing intranet system or host a competition, distribute part of this report to candidates as a guild line, asking them to propose a feasible solution and price.