5 BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE JOURNAL • VOL. 23, NO. 2 CUSTOMER-FACING BI AND ANALYTICS Organizing for Customer-Facing BI and Analytics By Hugh J. Watson and Brandon Obenauf BI and analytics (BI/A) have historically been inward-facing. Te information created, whether a report, dashboard/scorecard, or forecast, is about the operation or performance of the frm and is consumed by internal employees. Although this information is clearly valuable, companies can do more with the data they have, the tools available to analyze the data, and with whom the analytics capabilities and results are shared. A growing number of companies are recognizing that they have a treasure-trove of data, which, when combined with analysis capabilities, can be accessed and used by customers to increase their satisfaction, provide better service, generate revenues, and create a competitive advantage. Unlike internal BI/A that supports internal workers, customer-facing BI/A puts data and analytics directly in the hands of customers, whether it be B2C or B2B. Customer-facing BI/A can be thought of as an increasingly important way for connecting companies with their customers. Customer-facing BI/A is not new. Owens & Minor distributes medical and surgical supplies throughout the United States and in 2000 won TDWI’s Leader- ship Award for its innovative BI/A portal that allows manufacturers and suppliers to analyze purchases made by and for hospital groups. Essentially, Owens & Minor makes its warehouse supply chain data and analysis tools available to all its business partners. Today, customer-facing BI/A is all around us. Whether B2B or B2C customers, we track package shipments, use smartphone apps to fnd the best route to a desti- nation, and go online to fnd the least expensive hotels Hugh J. Watson is a professor of MIS and holds a C. Herman and Mary Virginia Terry Chair of Business Administration in the Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia. He is a TDWI Fellow and senior editor of the Business Intelligence Journal. hwatson@uga.edu Brandon Obenauf is a visual analytics consultant, Data and Analytics at Equifax. He has spent a majority of his career in data warehousing and Hadoop data architecture and holds B.S in MIS from the Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia. Brandon.Obenauf@equifax.com