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Getting More from Business Intelligence
Information Management Magazine, February 2007
What is Business Intelligence?
Ask a room full of people to define business intelligence (BI) and there will probably be as many answers as there are people. Some may believe this is a problem; however, to be successful in meeting BI needs today, emerging and enterprise businesses have to accept that it covers a broad range of capabilities.
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A New Approach to Business Intelligence
What would happen if companies looked at their data from the standpoint of the business processes that drive the data? What if organizations were to begin at the start of the process rather than when the data is already in the database? What if companies were to analyze the nature of the data as various processes impact it to identify real opportunities which improve performance? How would the exceptions that surface be handled? How much economic value could be realized if this data was presented as actionable information to appropriate personnel within an organization? By incorporating this new approach to BI, emerging and enterprise businesses will rise to the next level and improve their organizations as a result.
The Business Intelligence Funnel
What goes on within a business can be described as theBI funnel. The funnel helps to identify key business processes within an organization and the various systems that support these operations. The funnel also helps to identify a very important aspect of BI that many organizations struggle with - determining what should be measured.
For example, from a financial transaction point of view, the funnel starts at the top with customer-facing infrastructure such as a call center, Internet Web portal, point-of-sale system or project timesheet. It drives into operational components such as order processing, inventory management, purchasing and billing, then into financial components such as payables and receivables, and ends with the general ledger.
In discussions regarding these operational areas, it is possible to uncover critical business measures that beg to be monitored routinely as well as the interrelationships between systems that impact the underlying data. If an organization has been around for some time, there may be an inherent gut feel about what measures are important to the organization's success. Regardless of whether the measures are based on gut instinct or a written list of performance indicators, many are not monitoring themselves in a real-time, cohesive, systemic fashion. The problem is that anyone who has participated in a meeting knows that it is practically impossible to engage line-of-business and department managers constructively without empirical evidence. But history has proven that by monitoring measures to evaluate performance within an organization, performance in that area will improve over time. All you have to consider is the amazing success of GE under the leadership of Jack Welch as they adopted and embraced their own scorecard methodology to appreciate that every organization should be compelled to measure, monitor, manage and act.
It is also important to acknowledge is that by using the BI funnel any enterprise can identify its processes and systems, and define a universe of indicators that can be the keys to its successful performance. If these indicators are constantly measured and evaluated, that organization will improve and become more efficient, agile, competitive and profitable.
But many emerging and enterprise businesses, even with experienced executives on hand, have trouble defining a universe of key performance indicators. These organizations may have lots of data, but they've not reached the level of "intelligent organizations" — those who convert data into meaningful information that is relevant and delivered within the right context to appropriate personnel so it can be acted upon in a timely manner.
This transformation process takes a forward-thinking enterprise to succeed. Fortunately, organizations that are still using older existing systems don't necessarily have to change their systems to transform. Instead, they have to be willing to apply some incremental technology to get more out of those systems. If they do so, they will do themselves a major service.
Microsoft: The Great Equalizer
When someone says, "I need to change systems," their statement could often be rephrased, "I'm trying to get more information from my existing system. Because my system can't do that, I think I have to replace the system I've got." This approach could be misdirected. They may not actually have to change their source system, and shouldn't want to, especially if it is one that satisfies the demands of everyday operations and works. What they may need are tools that do more than just regurgitate data and instead generate information by aggregating and presenting relevant data in the right context.
Microsoft has leveled the playing field for emerging and enterprise organizations with its SQL Server database engine. It has extensive features for integrating data from multiple external sources, analyzing that data and reporting on it, and numerous reporting tools that interface with it. Just a short time ago, this type of technology cost organizations millions of dollars and many months or years to deploy. But now with Microsoft's technology, these capabilities are considerably more affordable for emerging and enterprise businesses than in the past. These technologies can be deployed alongside existing systems so that the implementation is less disruptive, takes less time and is more cost-effective than replacing entire operational systems.
The New Business Intelligence Process
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