In an economy where many companies are seeing cutbacks and are struggling to meet revenue goals, the business intelligence market remains reasonably strong. In fact, earlier this year, a BusinessWeek article recapped research from a number of analyst firms to state that business intelligence now ranks as the number one priority for most CIO’s. Cool…or should I say Qool! But wait…let’s step back for a minute and make sure we all follow one of the famous Stephen Covey habits of “starting with the end in mind”. In other words…WHY are CIO’s putting business intelligence at the top of their budget request wish lists?
Rather than jumping to the obvious answer, let me be a little more pragmatic and spell it out in three very simple reasons for embracing business intelligence:
#1 – The ability to MONITOR the business
#2 – The ability to ANALYZE information
#3 – The ability to MAKE BETTER DECISIONS
I would venture to guess that most folks would probably jump straight to #3 without giving enough credence to reasons #1 and #2. I think that can be a mistake. In fact, I think that a good BI strategy embraces the ability to monitor the business and analyze information effectively as the proper path to making better decisions. It’s a bit like picking up a new novel and reading the last couple of chapters before you read the beginning of the book. Now some of this (or maybe all of this) may be common sense, but as I talk to more and more companies about BI, it is clear to me that many companies are looking for shortcuts and are missing some key BI benefits along the way.
Monitoring specific KPI’s (key performance indicators) has traditionally been the mainstay of dashboards. This is hallowed ground for many of the traditional BI vendors. However, many of the traditional BI systems stop at the dashboard. Things got fun when you layered “alerts” on the dashboard to help send the signal that changes may be needed. Monitoring the business in an effective manner is done best when the dashboard, including alerts, are directly linked to the ability to analyze information when things seem out of whack. Business should NOT be like your car when the “check engine light” comes on. It would be a heck of a lot nicer if I could hit a button on my car and get into the details as to why my check engine light came on without having to go to the mechanic. (For my old Audi, the check engine light should just say, “Please insert $1500”) In turn, you should not have to go to IT for another report or to build a new OLAP cube when you need to analyze the data behind a potential issue.
Analyzing information efficiently is all about the ability to ask the key question of “why?” and then be able to efficiently answer that question. This has traditionally been a tag-team sport. Business users ask the questions, and then IT builds a report or a cube of data that hopefully has the answer. This is clearly inefficient and is part of the reason why tools like QlikView are becoming more popular. You can now quickly drill-down from the dashboard all the way to transactional data from source systems to answer the “why” question. Although most everyone will agree that the primary reason for adopting or enhancing BI solutions is to make better decisions, the path that you take to each decision should be faster and more efficient. A better decision that is implemented more quickly should have more value to the organization.
Therefore, if you are contemplating adopting or enhancing a BI solution, don’t shortcut the strategy and miss out on considering the efficiency of the dashboarding and analytics capabilities of the solution. The speed and flexibility of your analysis can play a major role in deriving value from your time and financial investments.
Until next time…Shawn