Q&A with Gregg Oosterbaan, Vice President of Technology Services, Columbus Zoo and Aquarium
The Enterprisers Project (TEP): You launched a major Business Intelligence project in an industry not known for top-of-the-line technology. How did you communicate the value of this new initiative?†
The Columbus Zoo and Aquarium is home to more than 10,000 animals representing 575 species from around the world. It's a regional attraction with global impact, because we contribute more than $1 million annually to support more than 70 conservation projects worldwide.
Because of rapid growth in both operating business and system complexity, we realized early on that the value in our Business Intelligence implementation would be better understanding our operations and making data-driven decisions. We realized some of our systems weren't tied in with each other, and we said, we have data problems. We can be a lot more efficient at what we are doing, and we need to make better fact-based decisions. It's a difficult fact to admit.
Communicating the value of a BI platform in the organization wasn't difficult, and in many ways was self-propelling. I spent time some with the other business leaders and stakeholders to help them understand the growing strain on IT resources to keep up with the demand for data, as well as the great benefits of enterprise reporting and better data management. Once I did that, the value proposition moved forward pretty quickly. We first implemented our BI platform in 2012 and have continued to move forward ever since.
TEP: Did you justify the investment on ROI grounds, and if so, how did you measure the potential ROI of business intelligence?
The zoo approached its needs methodically to determine the most cost-effective plan that would garner the biggest ROI. My own experience working in a corporate environment earlier in my career helped both with my understanding of BI platforms and projects and my ability to communicate how a BI tool would benefit the zoo.
As you gain more customers and online visitors and begin incorporating things like social media into your promotion tactics, you really start to gain a larger donor base, a wider potential customer base, and a deeper membership base. You have to capture that information or, right off the bat, you won't succeed at adequately serving existing customers or attracting new ones.
Measuring the ROI relative to the bottom line is more difficult. We know it has made us a lot more agile in our business decisions. Before the BI platform was implemented, some of the reporting the organization had to do required a lot of manual labor. By the time it was completed, enough time had elapsed that the action sometimes would be to adjust for next quarter or even for the following season.
Our reporting capabilities now made possible by our data processing system have given us the ability to make those decisions on a daily basis, where we can adjust and change course a lot more flexibly. If an employee comes in and has a PDF report sitting on his or her screen in the morning, the employee can take a look and make a quick decision right then about an adjustment for that business day.
TEP: Can you give us an example of how this level and speed of information capture has made a difference to your organization?
A great example for Columbus Zoo is our food stands. We create lots of reports centering on the different food and beverage locations we have around the parks. Depending on what those reports tell us, we may decide that some are doing well and some might be under performing, and we can adjust our business practices to move the locations around or adjust other aspects. We've found that by keeping a close eye on those types of details on a daily basis we can make business decisions that positively affect revenue.
The same is true for things like retail offerings--we can now look at differences in day-to-day sales and see how certain types of items are selling in certain locations, and make adjustments.
TEP: What are some of the challenges of managing IT in a non-profit organization?
One of the mainstays of operating in a nonprofit industry is that you always have to balance budget and mission against what you are doing. We certainly faced budget constraints for a BI project of this nature and size. At the end of the day, we want to make sure we are getting back what we put into the project and that it's accomplishing the goals we set forth. So that is always a challenge.
Another challenge is that I think, across the industry, the majority of organizations don't have an investment in a data architecture or a data engine such as this, and there's not a lot of widespread knowledge of it. So one of my goals was to meet the challenge of internally communicating the capabilities of a BI platform and why we needed it. It required a high degree of transparency, because you have to explain why IT is making this type of really large transformation in how we operate. There were social challenges and cultural challenges to rolling out tools such as this that people definitely needed to become acclimated to. We work in a traditionally non-technical industry, so this type of tool is not something most employees have on their radar. But once it was demonstrated, and started to roll out, the reaction was, Wow, we really do need that.
TEP: Are there other initiatives you wish you could have undertaken, or projects you're still hoping to persuade the zoo to launch?
There are always new projects; prioritizing them is the bigger challenge! One place I see a growing need is to use BI to reach our outer markets and understand them better, to find ways to educate them about wildlife conservation and at the same time draw them in to the Central Ohio market. A second area, which I feel is going to be a growing area, is using our Business Intelligence tools to track the health of our animals and analyze our scientific research. We havenít opened these doors yet, but the thought of the impact we could make in some of these areas is interesting and exciting.
TEP: What advice would you pass along to other technology executives working in companies or industries where technology is traditionally not a priority?
I think it's two-fold. When it comes to the assessment stage for business intelligence or data integration, be honest about where your challenges lie and where you're falling short. We had to be open about the fact that our systems were not well integrated, and our data management was not where it needed to be. That can be tough to swallow for some organizations. Secondary to that, donít be afraid to look outside your vertical when decision-making. There are a few other zoos that are doing this, but I would say we are at the forefront as far as the zoo and aquarium industry goes. A lot of them have shied away from a larger, holistic data architecture such as we put in, and have implemented smaller systems instead. For us, the concept came from outside businesses that already have well-established big data policies, data analytics platforms, and business intelligence platforms.
Finally, I would add that a balance of short-term and long-term business objectives is really important. We had a couple of key projects where we knew we could make an impact on right away. It really was kind of a new data architecture for us as well in that we knew we had a lot of data that wasn't good because of inaccuracies or redundancies, so it gave us an opportunity to tackle that challenge.
Having the ability to go after a couple of targets right away that we could vastly improve with BI and use to make a big impact gave us a chance to kind of snowball the system. Now we have departments speaking to each other much more often and in much greater detail about their data and what the BI reports are revealing. As we started to produce these reports, the internal customers began to better understand the capabilities. We were able to draw them in and add new features and analysis components to the original designs.
