Business Intelligence: Case Study

Business Intelligence: Case Study

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Business Intelligence: Case Study

            The case study reveals that most companies with diverse subsidiaries, like SYSCO, avoid having a fixed hierarchy that dictates mandates to their operational managers. Operational managers require a level of autonomy to pursue their unique strategies. The operational manager, given independence, will be motivated to maneuver as an entrepreneur growing a business (McAfee & Wagonfield, 2006). The above freedom eliminates the bureaucracy that would otherwise impede creativity and subsequently, innovation. Nonetheless, consistency of the operations must be established to ensure the company’s overarching objective is attained. Towards this end, the independent operational managers will be required to share data on common interests such as customer behavior. The operational managers often have different visions that inform their routes to the common objective. These differences manifest in data collection methods as well as storage strategies. These differences often prove counterintuitive owing to the incongruence of information.

            The strategies pursued by operational managers can be aligned if they operate within a common framework. The first step would be creating a singular database for the diverse businesses, data warehouse. The enterprise resource planning is strategic in helping the separate companies leverage a company’s information system by standardizing its software and hardware applications (McAfee & Wagonfield, 2006). Furthermore, the company may utilize business intelligence software to aid it to sort out the data according to the respective companies’ needs. The business intelligence software’s functions range from data mining to predictive analytics. The companies utilize different aspects of the same data relative to their approach. Therefore, it is recommended that the overarching company should buy the business intelligence model incrementally. They should have trial runs of new software to ascertain their efficacy and their alignment with the organization’s needs before committing to long-term agreement. Resistance to standardization from operational managers is to be expected thus their autonomy in regard to the installation should be limited.

Reference

McAfee, A., & Wagonfield, B. (2006). Business Intelligence Software at SYSCO. Harvard Business School.