Published on the 18/11/2015 | Written by Donovan Jackson
Business intelligence done well is a ‘fantastic tool’, according to Trade Me senior BI architect Philip Seamark, because it can provide the insight to shape focus and efficiency…
Like a lot of businesses, said Seamark, “Trade Me has started to take an increased focus in BI, and started to invest significantly more in making the best out of its data.”
Scheduled to present on the company’s BI journey at the 2016 Business Intelligence Summit taking place in Auckland, Seamark said Trade Me is not unique in this regard. “A lot of organisations, I think, have underinvested in BI and are only now really starting to appreciate at a business level what they can get out of it.”
Seamark equated BI with tuning a high performance motor car. “A business is not that much different; it presents a lot of opportunities to tune it and make it better. If you’re not doing that, the performance isn’t optimised and you’re missing out. In a business, without good BI, you are operating blindly. You might make a tweak here or there in the hope of improvement, but without good information, hope is all you have.”
However, he also cautioned that ‘just having BI’ is not good enough. “It can be done badly just as much as it can be done well.”
He said more businesses than ever before should be using BI solutions, while at the same time noting that the availability and useability of a variety of tools to solve specific problems has dramatically increased. “In the last few years, the quality of the tools has come a long way – but, it isn’t the quality of the tool which will determine the quality of the results. Even if you have good data [not always a certainty] you could get a poor result. You need to be able to ask the right questions of the data.”
Where Seamark sees a particular advantage is the ability of BI tools to take some of the load off business analysts, while also giving database administrators and web developers deeper insights into systems optimisation and the delivery of great user experiences – something he noted that Trade Me itself puts into practice.
“We use a number of specialised tools to understand operational data; we also have general users [of BI] with data warehouses and OLAP cubes, which are platforms for business-type data.”
Seamark provided some insight into the raw material with which he works: “There’s no one particular solution, we use, as different parts of the business have different needs – but each part generates a hell of a lot of data. We’re not too far away from our billionth listing and all the data which wraps around a listing is valuable raw material which we have to boil down to get a good picture of what’s going on,”
He noted the pace of change today, and said that modern businesses have to constantly evolve and look for opportunities to improve and enhance their offerings. “You’re not always going to get it right, but with good decision support – BI – you can quickly identify changes that are working and those which aren’t.”
More information and an agenda is available on the Business Intelligence Summit, taking place on 15 and 16 February at the Rendezvous Grand Hotel in Auckland.
