Disney grows its business intelligence

Feedback tools will be used in the company's finance, marketing and operations departments

Disney is increasing its use of business intelligence tools

Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment (WDSHE) is set to broaden the use of business intelligence (BI) tools across the division after the successful rollout of the technology in its sales department.

Following a review in 2001 which found there were no consistent views of data related to sales performance in the business, data warehouse and reporting methodology for that area were introduced in 2003.

The latest stage of WDSHE’s strategy is to broaden its user base and deepen the use of BI across the organisation by covering areas such as finance, marketing, operations (including logistics and supply chain management) and some of the accountancy functions, said executive IT director John Clift.

“We are also developing an approach to the data warehouse where we use the business intelligence platform as a data hub as well. So we are expanding what we use our BI environment for, both from a data flow perspective and from users’ point of view,” said Clift.

The business uses a BI platform provided by MicroStrategy for core analytical processing and job management covering all reporting, analysis and monitoring applications via the web or on a desktop. A separate system, provided by the same supplier, distributes information reports to business users via email, printers, file services, SMS and mobile devices.

The first area to receive the BI platform is commercial planning, a cross-function area of the division that involves sales, marketing and finance elements. Other departments will follow and the implementation will be completed in March next year.

The group will then move its focus to the development of a global BI model by moving away from the division between the international and North American operations. The project is already under way and will involve consolidating data depositories, working on a new set of analysis which reflects the global perspective on the information, said Clift.

“We are taking this opportunity to revisit our use of BI under the global perspective,” he said.

“In the meantime, we are encouraging users to think about business intelligence and make best use of the information available as opposed to just producing reports.

“There is always the assumption that users will have to download a pile of data to produce a graph. What we thought is that users should not need to go through the extraction stage and get the answer for their question, so that is our approach to BI: the work of extracting information from data should be done by systems, not people.”