Business Intelligence at Irish Life

Pioneering IT developer IBM noted that many big businesses are “unable to interpret 90 percent of their information” (Savvas, 2011). Leading insurance provider and retirement planner Irish Life stood out as one of those business unable to access, and therefore interpret, data-rich information.

Paul Egan, IT manager for business intelligence at Irish Life, succinctly described the data analytics environment arising from use of Oracle Discoverer as “MIS Monday Madness…copying and pasting and emailing…to satisfy audiences” (McKenna, 2011). Irish Life’s environment was facilitated by a mismanagement of accessibility that defined information accessibility as the sole realm of IT.  Such a outdated purview of roles engendered a system that failed to empower the appropriate personnel with the correct applications. The end result produced “static, with little trend analysis” (McKenna, 2011) reporting with poor functionality and a lack of individual service. A change was needed.

Mr. Egan’s vision foresaw individual environments were his IT staff could “enable data sources for power users to build dashboards” (McKenna, 2011) leaving the dedicated IT staff to focus on data development. Adoption of such a forward-thinking initiative requires operator criticism in order to induce a product which provides better user functionality. After a two-month test period that involved multiple systems and direct feedback, Tableau was chosen because its “strength is in allowing non-IT professionals to build their own dashboards which can then be published on the internet or distributed on mobile devices” (Smith, 2012).

Irish Life also dictated that any system chosen must support business growth and retention but maintain a “primary focus…to improve the sales pipeline and customer service management” (Savvas, 2011). Irish Life’s power users needed business intelligence capabilities which could “graphically represent data across the organisation (sic), improve decision-making and map patterns and trends in a cleaner way” (Savvas, 2011) by combining historical trends, real-time fiscal performance and future financial predictions.

Furthermore, Irish Life consciously decided customer ownership remained a necessary byproduct of their initiatives. Through the introduction of mobile-accessibility and online tools, customers are endowed with knowledge and feel a sense of control over their financial destiny. Customers can now engage better educated financial advisors using supported analysis regarding market predictions with the ability to “monitor a range of different aspects…such as sales margins, costs, the value of new business and head count” (McKenna, 2011). Consequently, Irish Life “tripled its customer base” (Stair & Reynolds, 2014).

Reference List

McKenna, B. (2011). Irish Life Chooses Tableau over QlikView, Oracle. Retrieved from ComputerWeekly: http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240112678/Irish-Life-chooses-Tableau-over-QlikView-Oracle

Savvas, A. (2011). Irish Life Deploys New BI System. Retrieved from ComputerWorldUK: http://www.computerworlduk.com/data/irish-life-deploys-new-bi-system-3321944/

Smith, G. (2012). Irish Life Chooses Tableau to Deliver Business Intelligence Dashboards. Retrieved from SiliconRepublic.com: https://www.siliconrepublic.com/enterprise/irish-life-chooses-tableau-to-deliver-business-intelligence-dashboards

Stair, R. M., & Reynolds, G. W. (2014). Fundamentals of Information Systems (8th ed.). Boston: Cengage Learning.