This is a fantastic presentation by Geoffrey West on the growth of companies and cities. Great insight.

Even in the case of extremely small businesses, a strategic deployment of a Business Intelligence solution can have major impact on the growth and profitability of the company.
Having a clear view of the profitable customers, products, regions and market segments is fundamental to understand the causes and expand upon the successes.

Equally important is to find those customers, brands, markets, segments and competitors responsible for draining cash and quickly stop the bleeding.

• Should we treat all customers equally?  (If you say yes, I’d suggest  reading “Angel Customers & Demon Customers”)

In a company that has more than thirty customers, the Pareto Principle will be evident.  Looking inside the famous 80/20 rule one can find that five percent of the customers generate close to 50% of the profits while the bottom 50% of the customers generate only 5% of the total profit.  

Many companies have a hard time identifying which customers belong to each group.  A strategic deployment of Business Analytics provides the answers instantly.

Even when sales revenue is growing, management should be able to ask key questions and find the answers right away, so the train of thought isn’t interrupted:

• Is revenue growing profitably? Where? How and Why?

• Are we paying sales reps commissions for bringing in unprofitable tonnage?

• Can we quickly tell whether the growth trend is just over last month, last quarter, same quarter last year or year to date?

• How about the profit growth of the last 52 weeks compared to the previous 52 weeks?  Is it really growing?

• Is our growth accelerating or decelerating?  How much?

• How is our profit growth versus budget or business plan? Where is it failing to meet objectives?  Why?

• Which competitors are threatening our business?

• In what regions and market segments can we maximize our growth?

A BI solution is fundamental to find answers to the seven layers of WHY's in order to get to the root cause of issues.  Being able to understand and correct these issues faster than the competition provides the company a competitive advantage regardless of how small the business is.



In the past deploying a BI solution was not affordable by small companies, not only due to licensing cost but also because the internal and external resources needed for set-up and maintenance.



This situation has changed though.  Today, there are many new analytics applications, either on premise or in the cloud, that are powerful, user friendly and very cost effective; making them ideal to bring small companies to the forefront of the 21st century technology to become true analytic competitors.

Republished from :http://www.strat-wise.com

Great Infographic by Get Satisfaction: 
Great opportunities by heath care to be able to leverage the data that they are collecting and to operate more efficiently.  
http://blog.getsatisfaction.com/2011/07/13/big-data/?view=socialstudies 

Data wants to be free. What does that mean? Should it be free of cost? Or should it be accessible? 

In a way, it should be both. Data's cost should trend cheaper and cheaper to store and access. But the cost to develop the data and the value of the data can be very high. Customer information, IP, and crucial performance information for a business is very valuable.

Free also means that data want to be available. It wants to be captured and available to provide context and importance. Data should be available to people when they need it. This is actually difficult to do sometimes, but is getting easier. Xenial has worked with several clients on their reporting projects to make sure that their data is available and timely. 

A cool tool that helps visualize data is Tableau: Tableausoftware.com check them out. It is easy to drag and drop reports and visualize the data. It may not be right for all organizations, but this is a great step forward in what is happening today in business intelligence and data visualization.

TECHNOLOGY: 
QR Codes are starting to pop up everywhere. You will likely see them more and more. For a technical answer, you can check out QR Codes wiki page here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_code

Basically they are codes that you can scan with your cell phone (you will need a barcode scanner app, which are free). The code contains information, which could direct you to a website, a video, or some other information.

APPLICATION:
As a consumer, you care about this because you can scan business cards, advertisements, or other media and get additional information quickly. OK, maybe it just saves you from entering in the site into a browser, but is makes things just a little easier.

As a business, you can use the technology to deliver information to people quickly. For real estate professionals for example, they can add a QR code to a listing to direct people to a specific site with more images and information. There is only so much information that you can fit on a flyer or business card. What is interesting is the information that you can acquire by using the codes. Have one code for business cards, one for a flyer at the open house, one for a flyer on the sign outside the house etc...  Since each of these items has a different code (all going to the same website) then you can track which medium is being successful. How many visits did you get from your business card this week? Did you get any new leads off of the process? Capturing this data will help you discover what is the most effective campaigns and help you be more efficient. Something definitely worth looking into.

Below is a video from a startup Flaretag, that allows you to create your own QR codes for free.

Welcome to the new re-launch of Xenial. We have been in business since 1995. But, it is time for a little refresher.