BI contribution for modern life

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After reading a great article from Ron Ashkenas about a possible new paradigm between work and life quality (read the article in English here) and reading an article from Seth Stevenson about the importance and possible use of Klout Score in marketing actions (see article here), I'm sure that we, Business Intelligence professionals, can substantially help people.

Of course the question I have to answer is: how? Well, first I have to admit that BI can't by itself make anyone live in a picture like the one above, but we can support the decision-making process to avoid wasting time with analyses that could be automated and that could speed up the transformation of decisions in actions.

Imagine the possibilities: if we loaded our clients' Klout Score in our CRM systems (Customer Relationship Management), besides being able to create marketing campaigns for a group of client more influential (as suggests the article I mentioned before) we could measure the return rate of these marketing actions as well, not only as direct response tho the campaign (like entering a web site or buying a product), but also about the impact (positive or negative) in social media.

We could likewise create a proactive occurrence register process in the CRM based on complaints posted in social networks and, of course, filter them by the user Klout Score to avoid opening thousands of tickets.

The impatient ones already stopped reading this article at this point under the argument that: although it is a good idea, this does not contribute to a improvement in the work and personal life balance and, therefore, it does not answer the question proposed by this article title. Now it is time to come up with the solution for those few braves ones that held this far.

The secret is that BI solutions are the only ones capable of consolidating these indicators, dealing with the amount of necessary data  (using the new technologies available to process in-memory and social intelligence, for example) and of presenting the results in a summarized way in a tablet or chart, for instance.

To translate it to a real life example, this means that a marketing director from a company could initiate a campaign on a Friday  travel with her family during the weekend and between a quick look in her Facebook and a call to her mom, take a look in a response rate of her campaign. Simple, two charts:

• a bar chart that compares the target group and the people that answered the survey, and
• another chart with the percentage of responses for the public 20% more influential, with distribution of positive and negative responses (with sentimental analysis based on Social Intelligence).

If the response to the campaign is being negative, the director could take corrective actions; if the response is being positive as planned, she can order another round of finger food. No need for checkpoints, conferences of verification, staying late in the office, etc.

In another scenario, it would bring the possibility, based on spontaneous actions on social networks such as: complaints or compliments, to trigger an action that could correct or encourage such behavior. Some of you are thinking: then the proposal is to work more outside business hours or on weekends? The answer is, yes. This is inevitable: However, there will be the opportunity to use less time, during the so-called "business hours" planning and inferring the reality and more time browsing the reality!

Regards,
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Eduardo Rodrigues is a Business Intelligence professional for 8 years, he has worked as client, entrepreneur, speaker, consultant, solution architect and project manager. Married with two children, he is also author of a poetry book called “Poemas de Botequim”. LinkedIn profile http://br.linkedin.com/in/rodrigueseduardo. Follow him on Twitter https://twitter.com/edur0dr1gue5