A Simple Plan
Embracing Simplicity Can Reap Huge Business Intelligence Benefits
Information Management Special Reports, April 2006
You have mountains of data and multiple tools to move, analyze and distribute it. But getting the right bits of information to the right professionals at the right time is still a hit-or-miss proposition. Even when you think you've got the right technology in place, users resist adopting it. Vendors keep pitching new-and-improved feature-laden solutions, but can you justify the expense for what could become yet another underutilized tool? Is there a future in all these features? Or is less the way to deliver more?
The problem is simple. It's complexity. Unfortunately, the solution - more simplicity - is complex and difficult to achieve. But simplicity has always been key to the adoption of new technologies. The prevalence of utilities - electricity, gas, water - and the widespread use of telephones, cars and televisions are all due to how simple they are to use. The Internet existed in public anonymity for two decades before the web browser delivered single-click simplicity. More recently, Apple's ultra-simple iPod launched the era of the digital media player, and Google's simple interface redefined search.
The Cost of Complexity
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In contrast, complexity has seriously inhibited the adoption of technologies. Analyst and consulting firms have measured the cost of complexity, and while the numbers vary, the cost to business appears to be astounding. According to the Standish Group, a staggering 66 percent of all IT projects fail or take much longer than expected.1 According to Gartner, every employee wastes an average of one week each year struggling with PCs and applications.2 And IDC predicts that IT complexity will cost U.S. firms $750 billion per year in 2003.3 In the business intelligence (BI) industry, a 2005 Information Week study revealed that ease-of-use issues for less technically savvy employees was the top barrier to BI adoption.4
This degree of complexity means a huge opportunity exists for IT professionals - in both large and small-to-medium enterprises - to introduce more simplicity into their organizations and spur wider adoption of tools that will help the company cut costs, improve user efficiency and productivity, and better align IT with business goals.
The Three Pillars of Simplicity
The root cause of complexity in BI - and in IT generally - is that the industry lacks a clear definition of the concept, making it difficult for simplicity to drive product design. Such a definition must be built upon three fundamental pillars of simplicity: an easy-to-use interface, usable features, and ease of deployment and administration. All three pillars must exist in a truly simplified product, and IT managers should begin pressuring their BI vendors to deliver them.
Easy-to-Use Interface
The user interface is the most obvious area of focus and has received the most attention over the last decade, but we still have a long way to go. In BI, the user interface remains the key limiting factor to adoption. Only about 15 percent of business people in companies actually use a business intelligence tool today, and unless we make significant strides in simplifying the user interface, this is unlikely to change.5 BI vendors continue to assume that users have time to learn programs and to study how to perform complex analyses. But they don't. In 1959, Calvin N. Mooers wrote what became Mooers' Law: "An information retrieval system will tend not to be used whenever it is more painful and troublesome for a customer to have information than for him to not have it."6 While specifically addressing having information rather than the pain of getting information, the Law was soon applied to the latter. But in the intervening 40 years, little has changed. Cindi Howson wrote, "Greater ease of use is a key to putting BI successfully in the hands of more users. IT often forgets that users already have other means of making decisions. If BI tools aren't better and faster than established methods, users won't bother with them."7
To make BI more appealing to more users, vendors must begin delivering interface innovations that allow any business user, even those who know absolutely nothing about database queries to get answers to their business questions. BI vendors have made great strides in this direction, mostly though interfaces that make it easy to drag and drop database fields or spreadsheet columns to quickly create interactive analyses. With a minimum of training, users can drag multiple fields to create complex reports, charts, and visual analyses. These tools typically access a variety of SQL and OLAP-based databases as well as Excel spreadsheets. Recently some vendors have begun to broaden beyond the drag and drop query model, which will never be simple enough for the majority of information consumers, by introducing question-based interfaces that let users ask basic or even complex ad hoc questions in everyday business terms, questions such as, "Who were my top five customers from last quarter?" or "Who were my top five customers based on net sales from my region in the past 12 months?" These tools must be intelligent enough to understand that once a new term is selected, a new context is created, ensuring that users never form incorrect queries to the underlying databases.
Another approach to simplifying the BI user interface is to eliminate a separate interface altogether by seamlessly integrating BI into a typical business professional's daily workflow. Often called "operational BI," this enables data, reports and analytical information to be presented directly to users in the context of their various applications and processes. Here we begin to see a shift away from BI merely as tools used to understand historical data and trends toward BI as real-time, process-centric information delivery and analysis. With operational BI, information is delivered where and how people work, and in most cases, the information consumers are not considered BI "users" in the usual sense of the term. Whether it's a process related to risk management, quote-to-cash, labor tracking, procurement, compliance or customer support, BI can play a role within the process or analyzing the process - or the process itself can be decision-centric.
Usable Features
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