Big data: Three ways to turn business intelligence into a business advantage

When it comes to big data, retailers have more information than most organisations. However, Julian Burnett, CIO at retailer House of Fraser, recognises the amount of information is not always matched by a level of insight.

“Retail is an industry that’s been trading on its gut instinct for quite some time,” he says. “Being able to back your decisions up with evidence of things that might work is crucial. I feel very confident that we’re getting our data set to enable us to properly inform our employees during their decision-making processes.”

Here, Burnett explains how he has placed business intelligence (BI) front and centre at House of Fraser and offers best practice tips to CIOs around developing a strategy, honing that capability and exploiting innovation, including artificial intelligence (AI).

Burnett says his firm’s investment in BI allows decisions to be made on evidence, rather than instinct.

As part of building up the technology team, Burnett — who joined House of Fraser in October 2015 — has focused on BI capability and hired specialist individuals with significant experience. While the firm was already using MicroStrategy’s BI software, it was not making the most of the technology.

Burnett says he used a test question when he arrived in the role. “How many people consume how many reports every day?” he says, referring to the query he posed to the rest of the business. “The answer to that question gives you an indication of just how messy things are — and in our case, there were about 800 active users in the centre who were consuming about 18,000 reports every day. That felt like an awful lot of information and it probably wasn’t being consumed effectively.”

Burnett said the realisation allowed him to define a significant opportunity around the creation of insight. He started a process of consolidating and improving data flows around the business, while also thinking about how the organisation could present its information more satisfactorily though the data visualisation tools that MicroStrategy provides.

“We just let that approach seep through the business to see what would happen,” he says. “The take up was dramatic. We accompanied the strategy with a campaign of encouragement and support, including webinars that people could join. There were regularly 200 or 250 people wanting to know how they could gain access to the new forms of information and what they could do with that insight once they had it.”

House of Fraser continues to hone its data strategy. The firm started trialling MicroStrategy 10 towards the end of 2016. The updated version of the technology gives workers access to interactive dashboards. Most of the implementation work was completed in the first quarter of this year, yet Burnett says BI projects always remain a work in progress.

“My ambition is to dramatically reduce the number of reports created,” he says.