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Chapter 1 • An Overview of Business Intelligence, Analytics, and Decision Support 65

About 75 percent of the effort was spent on acquiring, clean- single data warehouse approach and, after careful assessment
ing, and consolidating and validating the data, and very little of the needs of sales management and individual agents,
time was spent on meaningful analysis of the data. selected a business intelligence platform that would integrate
The Financial Performance Management initiative dynamic enterprise dashboards into its reporting systems,
implemented a new operating approach that worked on a making it easy for the agents and associates to view policy
single data and technology architecture with a common set information at a glance. The new reporting system, dubbed
of systems standardizing the process of reporting. It enabled Revenue Connection, also enabled users to analyze the infor-
Nationwide to operate analytical centers of excellence with mation with a lot of interactive and drill-down-to-details capa-
world-class planning, capital management, risk assessment, bilities at various levels that eliminated the need to generate
and other decision support capabilities that delivered timely, custom ad hoc reports. Revenue Connection virtually elimi-
accurate, and efficient accounting, reporting, and analytical nated requests for manual policy audits, resulting in huge
services. savings in time and money for the business and technology
The data from more than 200 operational systems was teams. The reports were produced in 4 to 45 seconds, rather
sent to the enterprise-wide data warehouse and then distrib- than days or weeks, and productivity in some units improved
uted to various applications and analytics. This resulted in by 20 to 30 percent.
a 50 percent improvement in the monthly closing process
with closing intervals reduced from 14 days to 7 days. Questions for Discussion
1. Why did Nationwide need an enterprise-wide data
Postmerger data integration
warehouse?
Nationwide’s Goal State Rate Management initiative ena- 2. How did integrated data drive the business value?
bled the company to merge Allied Insurance’s automobile 3. What forms of analytics are employed at Nationwide?
policy system into its existing system. Both Nationwide and 4. With integrated data available in an enterprise data
Allied source systems were custom-built applications that warehouse, what other applications could Nationwide
did not share any common values or process data in the potentially develop?
same manner. Nationwide’s IT department decided to bring
all the data from source systems into a centralized data What We can Learn from this application
warehouse, organized in an integrated fashion that resulted case
in standard dimensional reporting and helped Nationwide
in performing what-if analyses. The data analysis team The proper use of integrated information in organiza-
could identify previously unknown potential differences tions can help achieve better business outcomes. Many
in the data environment where premiums rates were cal- organizations now rely on data warehousing technologies
culated differently between Nationwide and Allied sides. to perform the online analytical processes on the data to
Correcting all of these benefited Nationwide’s policyhold- derive valuable insights. The insights are used to develop
ers because they were safeguarded from experiencing wide predictive models that further enable the growth of the
premium rate swings. organizations by more precisely assessing customer needs.
Increasingly, organizations are moving toward deriving
enhanced reporting value from analytical applications in real time with the
help of integrated data from real-time data warehousing
Nationwide’s legacy reporting system, which catered to the technologies.
needs of property and casualty business units, took weeks
to compile and deliver the needed reports to the agents. Source: Teradata.com, “Nationwide, Delivering an On Your Side
Nationwide determined that it needed better access to sales Experience,” teradata.com/Workarea/linkit.aspx?Linkidentifie
and policy information to reach its sales targets. It chose a r=id&itemid=14714 (accessed February 2013).

References

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Graduate School of Business. February 2013).
Asterdata.com. “Gilt Groupe Speaks on Digital Marketing Brooks, D. (2009, May 18). “In Praise of Dullness.” New York
Optimization.” www.asterdata.com/gilt_groupe_video. Times, nytimes.com/2009/05/19/opinion/19brooks.
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