Wendy's Deane acknowledges that this less-than-ideal environment for BI creates problems for the company when it needs to compare aggregated sales information from franchises with transactional data from company-owned stores - it's a hamburgers to cheeseburgers comparison. He says the company needs to increasingly make these comparisons as it looks to expand the pool of stores it uses for product testing and as it attempts to improve supply chain integration. To compensate for their suboptimal data collection environment, Deane is using an XML standard to collect more detailed information from franchisees who operate a large number of stores. (For smaller franchises, Wendy's uses a Web-based data collection system.) He also uses heuristics, or rules of thumb, based on activity at company-owned stores to extrapolate meaning from the aggregate data that franchises provide. For example, if a franchise-owned store does $US30,000 worth of business in a week, Wendy's corporate can make assumptions as to how that $U S30,000 would break down into sales of french fries, baked potatoes, hamburgers, chicken sandwiches and the like based on sales from company-owned stores in similar markets with similar aggregate sales histories. Proxies such as these may not be perfect, but they are a practical workaround and can be modified as needed to accommodate further integration with other systems, like the point of sale. Wendy's has no plans to get its franchises on standard technology because it sees its franchisees as entrepreneurs capable of making their own decisions about their operations, including choice of technology.

Because Wendy's is starting to understand the importance of having standard data to fuel business initiatives such as supply chain integration, the company was able to replace the phone lines and unstable modems that stores were using to transmit data to headquarters with a satellite connection in September 2002. The new, stable network helped improve the amount and quality of data that headquarters collects from both franchise- and company-owned stores. Where in the past Wendy's would miss information from as many as 40 stores out of 1200 due to unstable modems, it now gets consistent information from 1483 out of 1488 stores every night.

Why Force-Feeding Won't Work
Like so many technology projects, BI won't yield returns if users feel threatened by, or are sceptical of, the technology and refuse to use it as a result. And when it comes to something like BI, which, when implemented strategically ought to fundamentally change how companies operate and how people make decisions, CIOs need to be extra attentive to users' feelings.