Both monthly and quarterly, managers would receive printed analyses of the comments. The slow delivery hampered progress. For example, when numerous customers called in to say they'd love to see chocolate-flavored Toaster Strudel, it took the company months to even begin thinking about developing the new product. Hulting says deployment was timeconsuming. He and his staff had to decide on which types of analyses business managers would want to run.
Some companies choose to farm out their analytics projects.
For example, when British Airways wanted to increase the effectiveness of its Web site, it decided to outsource, says John Mornement, the company's senior manager of e-commerce operations and design. The airline hired WhiteCross Systems Inc. to analyze the 2 GB of Web traffic data the system collects, as well as to generate reports. Some of the analysis pointed directly to the fix. For example, dead links and pages that haven't been accessed for months are taken off the site daily. With the first report, the airline was able to mothball hundreds of obsolete pages.