ICC, a local IT services firm and Business Intelligence (BI) center of excellence, will host BI expert Claudia Imhoff, Ph.D. on July 17. Dr. Imhoff is the president and founder of Intelligent Solutions ( www.intelsols.com ), a leading consultancy on Customer Relationship Management and business intelligence technologies and strategies. She is a popular speaker and internationally recognized expert and serves as an advisor to many corporations, universities and leading technology companies. She has coauthored five books and more than 50 articles on these topics.

BI is a collection of technologies that allow business users easy access to company data, especially through reports.

Traditional reports are complicated, often compiled using thousands of spreadsheets and hundreds of man hours. Completed reports are based on data that is weeks old. Every company knows which of their products and services are selling best. But companies using Business Intelligence (BI) solutions also know details like:

•What is the revenue and margin breakdown on our top 10 products?
•What regions are exceeding budget; which ones are losing ground?
•How effective are sales reps at maintaining margins on our core products?
•How are freight/shipping costs affecting product profitability?

Reports created using BI tools are easy to generate and are based on transactional system data. This knowledge allows organizations to react more quickly to market changes and gives them an edge when it comes to forecasting things like sales and inventory.

Dr. Imhoff is the second world renowned BI expert hosted by ICC in 2008. Earlier this year, ICC welcomed Bill Inmon, widely recognized as the father of Data Warehousing and voted "One of the Ten IT People Who Mattered in the Past Forty Years" by ComputerWorld Magazine last year.

In addition hosting world renowned authorities, ICC boasts its own staff of over 40 BI experts and professionals. They have helped several companies in Central Ohio make better business decisions using BI solutions.