The Case for Using Business Analytics to Build Strategic Knowledge

Organizations are universally trying to develop more effective and efficient ways to deliver products and services to meet the increasing demands of customers. Environmental regulations are becoming stricter; society expects sustainable results, and the customers want it all at less cost. But what are water and wastewater utilities doing about the way that they design and manage their businesses? Business analytics can play a key role in the solution and if utilities can make the departments within their organizations 15% more efficient by 2022 they could easily recover the costs of investing in updated technology and processes.To do this, managers need to develop a system to access reliable information and build knowledge to facilitate good decision-making. This paper focus on how utilities can determine what is important and how to manage their way out of the reactive routine by developing and sustaining strategic knowledge. Strategic knowledge is the result of the seamless integration of transaction data with internal and external intelligence. This includes industry & customer segmentation, asset management structure, budget and revenue projections, capital forecast, growth, new opportunities, climate analysis, performance metrics, business innovation metrics and the ability to run instant reports on any combination of these dimensions over any time period in the past, present or future (like budgets or business plans).