Who is your customer?

Writing by Jorgen on Friday, 7 of March , 2008 at 1:20 pm

What is the most annoying thing that can happen when you want to buy a carton of milk? That the milk is out of stock! As a customer this is very frustrating. As a consumer of a certain product of service you want to get what you need. The same applies for BI. Whether it is a report, cube or specific tool specialist. But who is the BI customer? This depends on the supplier perspective. In ‘our world’ there are two types of suppliers of BI products and services: Systems Integrators and the BI department within organizations. The SI supplies BI knowledge and capabilities to the BI department. That is their customer. The BI department supplies reports, cubes and so on to different departments within their organization. An example: A SI delivers a reporting consultant to the BI competence Center within a large supermarket organization. This BICC delivers reports to the replenishment organization within the supermarkets. The performance of the BI consultant will be done by the BICC. For example using a assessment report. The performance of the BICC will be evaluated with the replenishment organization. They will probably use a Service Level Agreement for this or the yearly Customer Satisfaction Survey. In both cases the accountability is a direct relationship between supplier and customer. However the true performance can only be measured by the customer of the customer. Or maybe even their customer. What do I mean with this? For example, from the perspective of the SI the customer is not the BICC but the replenishment organization. If they are happy with the reports the BI consultant did his job satisfactory. And from the supermarket perspective the customer are the clients in the local supermarkets. If they can find their carton of milk the replenishment department did their work as they should.  In conclusion, you could argue that the current system for evaluating BI performance is incomplete or even incorrect. By limiting the evaluation to the performance between the direct relationship between supplier and customer an incomplete picture is drawn. Therefore both SI as well as organizations with a BI department should find a different way of measuring performance going down the complete value chain of BI. What do you think? Should we evaluate the BI performance with the availability of the carton of milk?

Category: BI Thoughts, Business Intelligence solution

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