Business Intelligence Strategy at Canadian Tire

Canadian Tire Corp. was a major enterprise consisting of five main business groups: a
large retail chain providing automotive parts, sports and leisure and home products, a
financial services division, a petroleum division, a specialty automotive parts division
and a retailer of casual and work wear clothing. The company in early 2003 decided to
focus its strategy on quality performance in each of the above mentioned sectors with
emphasis on total return to shareholders. It hoped to achieve the strategy through
development of a business intelligence infrastructure to enhance the overall business
capability. Simultaneously, the company intended to develop and implement an
Information Technology strategy which would list programs according to their level of
priority. E.g. the business intelligence infrastructure would be high on the priority list.
Some of the major challenges which the company was facing while implementation of
the strategy were:
1) Highly complex architecture with multitude of hardware, software, services, tools
and applications.
2) The focus on long terms gains while not neglecting short term profits or current
needs which would be a hindrance to the proposed BI infrastructure.
3) The fragmented BI efforts of various groups within the company thus leading to
lack of standardization of data definitions and queries and hence inaccuracies in
the data being analyzed
4) The change in strategy from a retailer to a wholesaler, thus increase in data
requirements and sources.
5) Consolidation of existing legacy applications.
6) Effective communication about the proposed implementation recognizing the
project as a cross-organizational business initiative.
7) Developing necessary skill set for the employees.

In addition to the above mentioned challenges and problems, a lot of cultural problems
were also arising. E.g. every department had a different outlook towards the proposed

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implementation. IT managers mentioned data quality and cultural changes as their biggest
hurdles while business managers placed education and training on their priority list.

The consultants from Cap Gemini established guiding principles like value addition,
making technical changes according to the plan, keeping the learning in house and to
sustain the proposed changes. It was also decided to have standardized data across all
areas of the business and to develop specific data marts for specific data functions. E.g.
Financial data marts would provide consistent and standardized financial data across all
enterprise.
It was also decided that BI specialists would assist in organizing data marts, retail
analytic specialists would access the BI tools and the data warehouse and end users
would have real time information to make specific business decisions.

In order to support this plan, I propose the following initiatives:

a) In order to counter huge organizational resources being consumed by the
organization, it would be beneficial for the company to re-evaluate the scope the
project in different phases and to assess the performance at every level.
E.g. Project review sessions can be conducted at pre-defined check points of the
project.
b) The infrastructure should focus on not only cross-organizational implementation,
but also integration of knowledge about customers, competition, market
conditions, vendors, partners, products and employees at all levels.
c) As proposed by the consulting group, the implementation should be business
driven rather than technology driven. It is very important that stakeholders from
areas like Marketing, Operations managers, Business executives, Sales and
customer support should have a say in all proposed implementation areas.
d) It is also important that techniques like Balanced Scorecard which support an
organization’s vision and strategy are put into practice so that objectives, targets,
metrics and incentives can easily be identified.
e) It is important to identify the shadow IT groups and make them part of the
technical expertise team of the BI team as they already know the needs of their

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 business areas and also the value provided by them would be recognized in the
form of training and knowledge sharing amongst the inexperienced and unskilled
members.
f) For personnel with non-technical backgrounds, it is important that metadata be
created so that all BI applications create and manage the meaning of each data
element thus dividing an organization in terms of its business activities and the
business objects on which they’re performed. This will help in free flow of
information to each level.
g) Also in addition to the area specific data marts, it is necessary that other
departments have access to these data marts for their analysis as well.
h) The short term profits should be compromised in a phase way to align with the
proposed implementation. As the BI implementation goes into the final stages, its
opportunity cost would be assessed with forgoing short term gains.
i) As far as analytical and modeling tools are concerned, the team should strive for
minimum number of tools so that troubleshooting does not appear too complex.
j) Lastly, it is important that the proposed implementation should be communicated
effectively to the end customers so that they understand the true value the
infrastructure brings to them in terms of quality and reliable service.