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scanned to avoid danger and seize opportunities. Meyer describes busi-
ness intelligence as the other half of strategic planning. Once the plan is
completed, business intelligence monitors its implementation and assists
in making strategic course corrections along the way.
Business intelligence is not just looking at your competition, but see-
ing all the changes around you, including politics, consumer affairs, and
even environmental issues. All these influence the long-term future of the
company. The use of competitive intelligence transcends industry bound-
aries and, if used correctly, provides the organization with an immedi-
ate advantage. No two companies will implement competitive intelligence
systems in the same way.
Perhaps the department with the biggest need to digest huge amounts
of information is corporate marketing. Aside from the product or service
being marketed, it is the efforts of the marketing department that will
make the biggest impact on the profitability of a company. It stands to rea-
son that providing marketers with the appropriate tools and techniques
will most certainly enhance their efforts and, in doing so, the bottom line.
Quaker Oats, acquired by PepsiCo in 2001, is a leading multibillion-
dollar international food manufacturer of cereals, pancake mixes, snacks,
frozen pizza, and pet foods. From a marketing perspective, this diversity
of products makes it difficult to perform the necessary marketing analy-
sis. All of these forces led Quaker Oats to build an automated decision-
support tool. With its plethora of functions and ease of use,
Mikey
is a
good example of that category of business intelligence systems called the
Executive Information System.
Mikey gets its name from the famous Quaker Oats commercial of
a bygone era where a finicky little boy tries a Quaker cereal and likes it.
Mikey was developed for an ad hoc query capability of large corporate mar-
keting bases and utilized a set of products from Information Resources,
now IRi (http://www.iriworldwide.com/). Due to its distributive nature,
Mikey quickly became Quaker's central coordinating facility for the cre-
ation and distribution of marketing plans, production requirements, and
financial estimates.
Quaker built a robust marketing system, the components of which
include business review reporting, marketing planning, ad hoc reporting,
general information, and utilities. The
business review reporting
compo-
nent produces standard reports based on the company's historical sales
and comparisons with competitors. The standard reports can be generated
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