How to deliver a more agile approach to business intelligence

Aberdeen’s report Agile BI: Three Steps to Analytic Heaven examined the strategies, tactics and technologies used to deliver business intelligence (BI) that – as you might imagine – is more agile. Aberdeen defines agile BI as business intelligence that can rapidly and cost-effectively adapt to meet changing business needs. So as emerging business events require managers to have access to new or different information an agile BI implementation can quickly deliver that information – through data manipulation by the business users themselves or by IT professionals.

Overall, this research found that organisations face three significant pressures in effectively delivering BI that is truly agile (Figure 1). High (and accelerating) growth in the information available is the most common pressure being experienced by organisations as they struggle to deliver BI effectively. In short, the volume of data exceeds the ability of the IT group to manage it, process it and turn it into information that is actionable.

Coupled to this, the decision making environment faced by executives and managers is also changing. Forty-three per cent of enterprises report that making timely decisions is becoming more difficult. Managers increasingly find they have less time to make decisions after business events occur. Or equally likely, managers need more – or different – information in order to support their decisions effectively.

Squeezed by these pressures, organisations of all types are fairly united in the approach they plan to take to manage the flood of data on one hand and the expectations of business managers on the other. In a nutshell, firms are working to streamline their IT organisation and simultaneously make executives and managers more self-sufficient in their use of BI (Figure 2).

To execute these strategies, there are many important capabilities and technologies that the organisations with the most agile BI implementations (know in Aberdeen parlance as the “Best-in-Class”) are using to differentiate themselves. These capabilities and enablers are fully discussed in Aberdeen’s Agile BI: Three Steps to Analytic Heaven (which you can download free until the end of May after registration). In conjunction with the implementation of these capabilities and enablers, Aberdeen suggests several courses of actions to deliver a more agile approach to business intelligence. These include:

•    Implement a plan for the formal development of BI knowledge and skills among the business user community. While 53 per cent of Best-in-Class enterprises currently develop skills in this way, only 23 per cent of other organisations do so. There are two core parts to an agile BI implementation. One of these is the empowerment of business users to become more self-sufficient. For this to become a reality, most organisations will have to provide some degree of education in the rudimentary concepts of business intelligence, with additional focus on the specific data and tools included in their particular implementation.

•    Improve the ability to access operational data. Sixty-seven percent (67 per cent) of Best-in-Class enterprises can tap operational data stores for business intelligence – an essential capability when managers in 53 per cent of those organisations need access to transactions an hour after they are generated. Only 41 per cent of other companies provide this level of access to business managers.  When updates are required so soon after the business transactions have been created, data warehouses and data marts are probably not going to be able to provide the refresh time necessary.

•    Introduce and maintain a process to collect and formulate end-user BI needs. At present, 72 per cent of the most agile firms (the Best-in-Class) have such a process in place, compared to only 43 per cent of other organisations included in Aberdeen’s research survey. A formalised process, consistently applied can help to ensure that essential business intelligence needs across the organisation are gathered and understood. Without such a process, it is likely that some needs in the company will go unmet and others will be poorly fulfilled – perhaps missing some of the data required, or simply not being updated frequently enough.

These courses of action, along with other recommendation from Aberdeen, will help put you on the path towards a more agile approach to business intelligence.

Nick Castellina, Research Associate, Aberdeen Group
David White, Senior Research Analyst, Aberdeen Group