Business intelligence (BI) software has been around for some years, but is now starting to be adopted in boardrooms across the globe. As data is employed more intelligently, BI is being used by organisations as a way to grow business and achieve competitive advantage.

With a history spanning more than 30 years, Cognos is positioned at the heart of the BI sector.

Computing met Cognos chief executive Rob Ashe to find out how he sees the sector evolving.

What is the core function of BI software?

My strategic vision is of a platform for performance management. I think of it as a system for managing performance every bit as much as people use enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems for managing transactions.

Monitoring performance is for decision making, usually in a management context for transparency, accountability, managing the ability to set goals, and corporate governance.

It was almost 20 years ago that we witnessed the birth of ERP. It had that dream around transactions, and we hope to deliver the same for decision making.

If the success of a business depends on the transactions it carries out, why is BI software so strategically important?

Performance management is a core strategic system. It is ludicrous that we sit here today and say: ‘performance management is becoming a core system’, when it should have always been a core system. I think people have been trying to get at the same thing in different ways.

ERP is a good example, where the efficiency of the transaction going through the organisation is not the ultimate goal in a linear sense; the ultimate goal is actually better performance. Everyone’s aim is still to reduce transaction costs to be more competitive. But I think what has emerged is a view that, above those transaction systems, there is the ability to gain a return by just driving better decision making.

What problems are your customers using BI to solve?

Clearly the data is available, but it is not always in the best format for users. Our customers’ biggest problem is making the data accessible.

We have just gone through a really heavy period of focus on governance and a toughening up of the regulatory environment. This is forcing people to look into the data with BI systems to find their key performance issues.

A good example here in the UK is the Operational Financial Review (OFR). The OFR is really going to make people think about what kind of performance data they have to disclose to their shareholders.

So is BI aimed purely at helping senior managers?

There are two sides to using BI: business management and IT management.

IT demands are usually led by business demands. The business demands are usually in areas concerning interactions with customers, with the external parts of the supply chain, and around internal resources – and that’s not just the processes that run the business, but also its people. That data is spread across a pretty broad set and scale of applications.

The fundamental difference now, compared with five years ago, is that we used to be able to get that performance information out to the right people on a small scale in fairly unsophisticated environments.

BI is now operating at an enterprise level. That is why we are so focused on

getting the message across to the IT department first and foremost, so we can show them what they can do with solid BI at the back end and free up its delivery capability to fit in with more complex environments at the front end without actually adding to their workload.

How do you suggest a business gets maximum value from a BI implementation?

The key is providing more context for the user of the data. We are putting BI more and more in the context of a process in terms of business goals, objectives and ease of data consumption.

If you know the business process and your place in the process, then it is easier to know what to do with the data that is available to you.

Whether it is an approval level for a loan or a discount level for a customer, giving some business intelligence where the user can look at similar decisions or similar circumstances is one way we can make better decisions.

We also offer dashboards and other tools to make the data easier to consume.

What would you say to critics who claim it is difficult to prove return on investment (ROI) on BI projects?

Any ROI is fuzzy before the fact; the job is proving it afterwards.

For example, within three months of installing BI, and by connecting to two different data sources that it was previously unable to connect, a very large trucking company discovered that it was claiming the parts for the trucks under warranty when they were brought in for service, but not the service associated with fitting those parts. After those three months, the company was able to cover the cost of the tools.

There is an intuitive belief that people with better data can improve the decisions they make and discover things about their business that they never knew before, and if you look at it that way you can usually find some ROI in there.

Cognos’ latest product release supports a service-oriented architecture strategy. What does that mean for users?

Say you have a user and you have a security module that describes what access that user can get. As a vendor, should I use that existing security module as a service or force the user to use the one I design and sell with my products?

Our platform uses a services layer so people can access our capabilities without having to access other applications. We can also reach into our customer’s environment, find their security module, and use that.

You don’t have to use all my stuff. It lowers the complexity of the environment so you don’t have to keep overlapping. Services orientation is really key to fitting into the IT environment.