In 1979, Dan Bricklin was a young student working on his Master of Business Administration degree at Harvard Business School when he had a vision for a software application that could put the power of the computer into the hands of business users. Working over a weekend on a borrowed Apple II computer, Bricklin developed his first prototype of VisiCalc - an electronic spreadsheet that would revolutionize the software industry - and ignited the nascent personal computer industry.
At the time, all business computing was relegated to mainframes and minicomputers housed in the IT department and ruled by the “high priests” of that technology. IT had a host of tools available for creating applications, but because of their huge cost and lengthy time for development, only the highest-value business applications were worthy of consideration. Although business professionals further down in the hierarchy were eyeing the new personal computers as a way to solve some of their departmental problems without involving IT, there was precious little software available that was practical, useful and reliable.
VisiCalc changed all that. After a sneak peek of VisiCalc in mid-1979, Ben Rosen, one of the major players in the PC world who later went on to fund Lotus and Compaq, called VisiCalc “a new concept in software that could well go a long way toward fulfilling [the] needs of professionals and alleviating their frustrations.”1 Rosen marveled at how people who had never used a computer before could write and use programs in minutes with VisiCalc. While Rosen acknowledged the software’s limitations (it lacked transcendental functions, for example), he recognized how VisiCalc “does lend itself to the solution of a broad class of problems where interactive operation and lots of flexibility are desired.”2
Nearly 30 years later, not much has changed. Department managers are still relying on their electronic spreadsheets - descendents of the original VisiCalc - to analyze business process data. Today, analytics and business intelligence (BI) systems are mostly restricted to the realm of the IT department and still ruled by the high priests of this technology, the trained data analysts. Although IT has a huge array of BI tools at their disposal, BI systems primarily serve the needs of senior management because of the huge cost and lengthy time for development. Department managers and other business professionals are eyeing BI as a way of solving some of their departments’ problems, but most software available is still too hard to use, too costly and takes too long to implement.
Before VisiCalc, people only had tools they could use to build applications. It required specialized expertise, time and money to create applications people could use. Analytics and BI today are in a similar place, but a new breed of role-based BI applications are about to change all that by bringing the value of analytics into the context of someone’s job.
BI represents a $50+ billion global market, but the penetration of BI systems across the enterprise is stuck in the 20 percent range, leaving around 80 percent of people in companies unable to utilize BI.3,4 Because of its complexity and cost, BI has been limited to use by knowledge workers and the IT department - the people who are trained in the use of analytic tools and proactively applying them to perform analyses.
Instead of analytic tools, role-based BI harnesses the power of analytics to deliver applications anyone can use without any specialized knowledge or training. By focusing on specific roles, these BI applications can anticipate exactly what data the user needs and how to package it to make it most valuable and easy to consume. When combined with the Web-enabled technology of on-demand delivery (software as a service or SaaS), role-based BI applications can begin to deliver value in a day instead of months or years.
This point became clear to me recently when I visited my new wireless carrier’s local retail outlet. I was about to take a trip abroad and needed to upgrade to a new handset that would work overseas as well as at home. As the salesperson handling the changeover entered the data for my new account, I noticed two small rows of dots at the bottom of the screen labeled “churn” and “revenue,” and I immediately realized that this was a perfect example of the value of analytics embedded into the middle of a business workflow.
Those two rows of dots provided the salesperson with an indication of my potential value, which in turn would affect how the salesperson was going to interact with me. Using this simple display, the account management system was indicating how likely I am to remain a customer over time and what my value (in revenue) is worth to the company. It was also letting the salesperson decide whether to quickly sign me up and get rid of me or spend more time trying to sell me additional services. This is truly actionable information.
