Today's giant corporation is much like the CIA in its ability to gather and generate terabytes of information and intelligence. It can produce unlimited reports, metrics, benchmarks, and segmentation of every customer, operation, process, and transaction. But what does it all mean? That's where good analytics—based on both technology and human interaction—come into play; analytics make the difference between information overload and real business value. What follows are best practices of four businesses in very different industries that each found the right mix of tools, processes, and management to maximize the value of their data.—The Editors

Other companies covered in this section:

Caesars
Dunkin' Brands
McKesson
PHH Arval
Travelocity

Nowhere is the value of business intelligence (BI) and enterprise data management more evident than in the gaming, entertainment, and hospitality industries. When a loyal casino customer hits the jackpot at a slot machine in Reno, Nev., or Atlantic City, N.J., what's important is not how many terabytes of data are stored in our data warehouse or the kinds of reports some analyst can run after the fact. Rather, it's how the information is leveraged in real time to serve the customer immediately on the casino floor. If the customer is celebrating a birthday, for example, that data will let employees know instantly so they can surprise the guest with a special greeting or gift in the casino or hotel room.

To take another example, consider a Total Rewards Diamond card customer who's a regular at one of our Midwest riverboat casinos. BI lets us know what gaming experience that customer most enjoys, as well as personal preferences as to room accommodations, restaurants, and entertainment amenities, so we can determine what incentives will best persuade the customer to visit our Rio or Flamingo hotel casinos in Las Vegas.

These are just some of the personalized services that Harrah's Entertainment can increasingly provide guests as a result of our focus on customer-facing, analytical, and operational BI efforts. No matter how broadly our casino entertainment locations continue to grow, or how complex our business and IT operations get behind the scenes, we recognize that we're in a discretionary consumer-service industry where customer loyalty and satisfaction, at the individual interaction level, make or break our business every day. That's why we've been investing in innovative CRM approaches and BI processes and technologies, as well as refining our core Total Rewards loyalty program. We're also integrating myriad other customer-facing and back-office systems and capabilities to give us a 360-degree view of our business.

Our goal is to create individual relationships and differentiated service among the nearly 40 million customers in our database who choose us for casino entertainment.

Setting us apart from competitors is the fact that all these customers—including our recently acquired base of Horseshoe Gaming and Caesars Entertainment guests—will enjoy the benefits of Total Rewards and our data-driven CRM and BI approaches. Our expanded customer base lets us offer an even broader set of locations, brands, and amenities in the United States—and, increasingly, abroad. In fact, international development is an exciting new growth area for us. We now operate in Canada and South America, and recently announced planned projects in Europe, the Caribbean, and Asia. These will leverage and enhance our existing capabilities and also let us create new value and insights. (For more on the integration of Caesars, see below.)

As with any successful enterprise BI approach, many sources of business data can be leveraged at the local or enterprise level for analytical insights. At Harrah's, these include financial, operational, transactional, marketing, product, labor, and customer-satisfaction data. Business and technical processes are used to acquire, archive, and organize that data into a data warehouse so that standardized and ad hoc reporting and analysis tools can ensure the efficient communication of the insights gleaned from the data in the right format, at the right time, and to the right people.

We've partnered with Cognos, IBM, SAS, Teradata, Tibco, and others to create a highly integrated and customized solution to meet our needs. And while BI technology and techniques are critical to the execution of our strategy, another key is our strategic customer focus and a culture of analytical inquisitiveness and data-driven decision-making throughout the company.