At PASS Summit this year Ted Kummert talked about some of the trends that he saw in the industry and the corresponding opportunities that these changes would provide for businesses. One of the opportunities that Ted mentioned was enabling pervasive insight. During his presentation, he highlighted Great Western Bank (GWB) as an example of an organization that has taken full advantage of Business Intelligence (BI), both for the end-user and for the BI professional to gain greater insight into their business.
Below you can see the first of a series of four videos where we look at how Great Western Bank has taken advantage of this increased insight to keep ahead of its competitors.
One of the most common success criteria for BI projects is senior management buy-in to the project, and at Great Western Bank this comes from their President and CEO, Ken Karels, who sees BI as the ‘engine’ of their business, converting information into insight.
On the face of it the initial project aims for the Bank may come across as a little mundane – to achieve compliance to the Basel II banking regulations, but several aspects of this project stand out. Firstly the sheer speed of deployment of this project - two months from request to delivery, something the regulator was surprised by. Secondly regulations are often held up as something that can hold a business back, but in this project the adherence to the regulations has helped the bank to increase return on capital by 2% making them more competitive. Finally, the pay-off for BI projects can often be difficult to measure, but in this project the cost of the project was paid for in less than a year by the lower capital requirements.
As Head of Business Intelligence, Ron van Zanten points out, they have achieved a balance between the needs to empower end-users with tools that are easy to access and use on the front-end with their Corporate BI requirements to standardize and clean information. Using Microsoft BI has allowed them to scale to the demands of a growing business, without compromising service-level or accuracy.
Looking forward to future developments with Microsoft Office 2013 and SQL Server 2012 SP1, Ron sees more opportunities to make information even more accessible through Power View in Excel – the platform employees are most comfortable using for BI.
Check out how Great Western Bank is using BI to power the business below.
-- David Hobbs-Mallyon, Senior Marketing Manager, Customer Evidence and References