Business intelligence for the masses

View Comments and Questions (5)

What's Your Question � Ask Our Experts..

Business Intelligence - Whats the value of business intelligence

Not so long ago, if business leaders wanted vital information about how their company was performing, they often faced delays that could drag on for several days, even weeks.

The first problem was to give a definition of business intelligence and then that the business intelligence (BI) tools used to extract vital data from corporate databases were the domain of so-called ‘power users', most typically business analysts and members of the IT department. At many companies, demand for their services frequently outstripped their capacity to produce requested reports quickly enough.

And when those reports did make it in the hands of the business leaders, meanwhile, it was difficult to disseminate the information they contained to employees lower down the company - hampering, in turn, the workforce's ability to pursue the overall strategic goals set for the business in an informed way.

In recent years, however, all that has changed. "Many companies now distribute BI capabilities to virtually all parts of the organisation, putting critical data into the hands of those who need it to make better day-to-day business decisions," says Rob Bailey, a BI specialist at Logicalis. This is the difference between data mining versus business intelligence.

However, they're not rolling out the complex query and reporting tools used by power users. Today's BI tool is more likely to take the form of a web-based dashboard or scorecard that represents current performance against company-wide benchmarks in a neat, visually appealing format.

"Not every user requires a very high level of analytics within the tools they use. What they're looking for, in fact, is something a little more generally available and user-friendly," explains Richard Simmons, also a BI specialist at Logicalis.

As the use of BI has permeated across the enterprise, he adds, it is moving away from a report-centric historical view of the organisation towards a real-time snapshot of what is happening at all levels of the business at any given moment.

And the results of that are clear: fewer data delays and more data democracy.

Your Comments and Questions

Rob Bailey, 10 months ago

Yes, a key part of any BI implementation is deciding what it is you're going to measure, and having found out the results, what you're going to do with the information. BI tools don't actually care what those metrics are; choosing a BI tool is more about understanding your technical environment, and how you would like your users to gain access to the information.

Janner N, 10 months ago

ah - that makes more sense, thank you ..so it sounds like understanding the business and creating the relevant metrics is the most important bit and then creating the technology come second?

Rob Bailey, 10 months ago

Well, Business Intelligence is something of a catch-all, covering quite a wide range of solutions. To me, the key common feature of BI solutions is that they allow you to use your company’s data to drive intelligent decision making. This can happen at all sorts of levels. Traditionally, the focus has been on the ‘executive dashboard’ – that is, a single web page providing executives with key business metrics at a glance – or on ad-hoc query and analysis features allowing power users to analyze past performance, look for trends in the data etc. In both cases, one would hope, this should result in informed decision making. Today, however, the trend is to embed business intelligence into business process, so that it becomes pervasive throughout the enterprise. What this means, for example, is that when customers buy products from your web store, an alert will be triggered if stock levels drop too low, and the buyer will be notified via a simple stock report. Ideally, this report should also allow the buyer to click to place and order with a supplier. In this way, business intelligence solutions move from assisting executives and power users in the decision making process to actually providing information that is immediately ‘actionable’.

Mandy Shaw, 10 months ago

Have a look at the IT Sanctuary wiki on this subject (at bottom of this page, or go to http://www.theitsanctuary.com/wikis/39-business-intelligence). Let us know if it doesn't help ...