Case Study: 5 Categories of BI Identified for McCormick

To represent Business Intelligence (BI) projects of McCormick, use the five categories of BI that identified for McCormick. In actual practice, there might well be more than five projects, but let’s use five that will suffice. There are several ways to go about creating the BI opportunity map, one of which is to have one person array the projects within the opportunity map quadrants as the starting point for discussions with knowledgeable business and IT leaders and managers. If this approach is used, the initial BI opportunity map for McCormick might look like below:

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• All projects were judged to have a very positive business impact owing to strong alignment with company strategies and core business processes. Manufacturing BI was considered to have relatively less business impact because supply chain costs are a much higher proportion of total finished goods costs than are manufacturing costs. Financial planning and control BI was felt to provide lagging indicators, whereas product development BI, SCM BI, and customer service BI were judged to have more direct impacts on McCormick’s ability to execute its business strategies and value disciplines.
• The projects were judged to have different risk characteristics based on the relative technical difficulty of acquiring and integrating the data needed to delivery the information from the source systems that contain the data, the availability and quality of the underlying data needed to deliver the information, and a number of organizational readiness factors.

Business and IT leaders and managers can use the initial BI opportunity map as the starting point for discussions addressing the underlying assumptions of the initial project placements, and then they can potentially adjust those placements, as illustrated as below: 

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In the example above, the discussion of risk-reward tradeoffs resulted in a group consensus that:

• Manufacturing BI had greater business impact and greater risk than originally perceived, as indicated by the manufacturing BI box.
• SCM BI had greater business impact and less risk than originally perceived, as indicated by the SCM BI box.

Based on these discussions and the relative placement of the projects within the BI opportunity map, McCormick might then prioritize its BI opportunities as follows:

1. SCM BI
2. Product development BI
3. Customer service BI
4. Financial planning and control BI
5. Manufacturing BI

These priorities would then establish the order in which the specific BI development projects would be undertaken.