At the Insight Session on Business Performance, Processes and Systems, George Ioannou, Professor of Operations Management at Athens University of Economics and Business said truth resides in data. But finding that data is like trying to find a pirates’ treasure buried on a desert island. It takes more than one search.

First, you need a map to identify the location – the map that is perhaps hidden under the floorboards of a seafarers’ tavern. This is the task of business intelligence. But you’re still not done. You need to be able to interpret the map, and this is the task of analytics.

George’s MBA students have helped many business partners to find the treasure. As an example, he spoke about a project to identify the true linkages between branch profitability and typical financial services KPIs such as customer acquisition, up-selling, cross-selling and customer retention. Business intelligence delivered some unexpected results, suggesting that new customers were more profitable than existing ones. BI revealed correlations, but not necessarily causality.

It therefore took SAS analytics to enable proper interpretation of the data, revealing that dormant and unusual accounts were skewing results (for example an entire government ministry banked at one branch). Also time to profitability needs to be taken into account: analysis revealed that while upselling has an immediate impact on the bottom line, with cross-selling can take nine months or more.

These analytics insights can and should influence business decisions such as marketing strategies.

Photo credit: cameronparkins // attribution: creative comons