Greg Smith thinks big. Whether it be figuring out how to transmit data from remote areas or writing a groundbreaking new book on what it takes to be a CIO in this era, Smith is not only an IT practitioner, but also a leading strategist.
Smith is vice president and CIO of World Wildlife Fund. He is also the author of “Straight to the Top: Becoming a World-Class CIO.” In his answer to defining business intelligence, Smith provides six core business intelligence initiatives at the WWF.
“I think business intelligence today is more about helping drive revenue than putting financial indicators or dashboards on executives desktop.
“Sensors and monitors are great, but in many cases, standard Web-based reports may well suffice for most of these reporting needs. In addition, most financial and budgeting applications are now building in some component of BI, usually OLAP, to enable financial dashboards and more drilling and pivoting through financial and budget data.”
Smith said they are doing precisely that at WWF, but that it really still sits outside of their core BI initiatives, which focus on the following:
1. Analysis of their donor/prospect database to increase revenue and streamline campaigns (offline or online).
2. Ad hoc query capability to facilitate quick lookup of key donor information. Both their marketing and development staff use this.
3. Analytics and modeling to help drive and increase revenue.
4. OLAP for slicing and dicing of donor and prospect data.
5. Web-reports using BI tools.
6. Theyre looking to move towards data mining and do more cluster analysis of their file.
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