Sometimes, you may wonder what’s the point of business intelligence (BI) anyway? BI is one of the keys to unlocking sustainable execution of an organization’s strategy. BI enables organizations to gather and analyze financial and operational information in order to make better-informed decisions faster. It answers the questions “How are we doing?” and “Why are we doing so well or so poorly?” This gathering and analysis also helps develop more realistic, fact-based business models and scenarios, which turn into realistic plans and forecasts that eventually answer the questions “What should we do?” and “How should we do it?”
Business executives want BI systems “to deliver the right information to the right people at the right time so they can make optimal business decisions, according to Wayne Eckerson of TDWI.”1
Role-based BI (RBI) acknowledges that different people responsible for different roles and activities in an organization need to look at information in different ways at different times. Yet, all the different perspectives and points of view must align with one another and ultimately with a company’s strategic objectives and targets.
This article looks at three critical success factors of RBI: focus, alignment and accountability. It demonstrates a new way of making RBI a reality in your organization.
Focus
It’s rather unlikely that one day every user in the enterprise will have a completely unique information dashboard or reporting system tailored to that individual. The amount of effort required to create, maintain, train and support thousands, or millions of dashboards is daunting. Rolling-out solutions for each job title could simplify things a bit – so that all accounts receivable clerks have the same dashboard, for example. But that could still require an enormous effort and investment.
Rather, the focus should be at the intersection of a user’s business function (marketing, sales, operations and finance, for example) and their “layer” in the organization: strategic, operational or tactical (see Figure 1). In this way, an organization has one dashboard for marketing operations (which would support dozens of job titles) and one for tactical finance (A/R, A/P clerks for example). Typically, organizations have eight to 12 main business functions that are industry specific, which means designing, building and maintaining 24 to 36 dashboards if you use the three-layers this article suggests. This will support 90 percent of the organization allowing for special “one-off” or “project-based” dashboards.
Alignment
One of the disciplines of designing and building BI solutions for this intersection focus is that intersections, and the information within each, must align with one another. There are at least four kinds of intersection alignment:
- Cross-functional alignment – This is where information from one function, perhaps marketing, is aligned with another, such as finance. So when marketing includes product-line or channel profitability information in their BI “lens,” it’s the same information that finance has on its profit and loss statements.
- Cross-layer alignment – Within a function, information is aligned top to bottom (strategic to tactical) and is generally more granular the further down through the layers. For example, using the example of marketing again, perhaps one of the top strategic measures on the marketing executive dashboard is market share. If you drill-down into marketing operations, you see that market share is made up of several key performance indicators (KPIs): sales price, sales volume, customer preference, channel efficiency and promotion effectiveness. Any one of these can be key measures on the marketing operations dashboard. If we look at customer preference, for example, and drill even further down, we come up with net promoter score (NPS) – the difference between the percentage of customers who would recommend and an organization those that would not. It is a tactical measure to be tracked at the tactical layer of the marketing function.
- Role-to-role alignment – There is also necessary alignment from intersection to intersection (or focus area to focus area). Consider the NPS information above for example. That would also need to be used (consumed and contributed to) by those in roles that are at the intersection of operations and any one of the three layers. For example, tactical operations works on product or service quality – a key factor that determines NPS.
- Alignment with strategy – BI solutions and information must tie back to what’s good for the company. How does your focus area perspective relate to company strategy? If your strategic objective is to improve overall customer satisfaction, NPS is a good measure to have – so our example is aligned.
