The case for business intelligence

The goal of business intelligence (BI) is to ensure that the right people have the right information at the right time, to make the best decisions.

But how do we define BI itself? Neil Chandler, research director at Gartner, suggests that BI has transformed over the past three or four years to include business analytics.

“BI is now an umbrella term that has expanded quite significantly to incorporate different analytic applications, for example sentiment, social and predictive analytics, and the entire rise of the performance management spectrum,” he says.

The job of the IT department is to link these disparate elements together and manage them as a portfolio. One potential way to do that is to work with fewer suppliers.

But it is possible that no single vendor is able to meet all your business needs, depending on how you want your data to be analysed and presented.
The second part of this guide will deal with the market and the various offerings available.

Disparate data
One of the first challenges inherent in BI is the data itself. It can derive from many sources in an organisation, or externally.

Sentiment analysis is an example of working with external data, and is generally applicable in a business-to-consumer environment. The data comes, often in real time, from external web sites, usually in the form of customer comments and opinions.

This type of analysis is intended to help companies gauge what consumers think about their products and brand. They can use this insight to guide, say, product development or marketing initiatives.

“We aren’t doing away with the ‘gut feel’, or the expertise of those making the decisions, but rather supporting those decisions with a portfolio of facts,” explains Chandler.

The issue is that information is being delivered from a number of assets. The problem is exacerbated by the relatively recent rise of self-service tools in the cloud, for example Google Analytics.

“The cloud enables people to do their own analytics. Staff can look at a portal and get a view of the reports they want to see,” says Chandler.

Ideally, BI will involve the entire organisation. Michael Blackmore, enterprise architect at BT, argues in the December 2010 edition of Oracle Magazine that BI should touch everyone in the organisation. Otherwise, he says, “how do you effectively measure corporate performance or transform the business?”

The Holy Grail for BI platform vendors is a console that enables views of data to be dragged from multiple sources, tailored to the user’s specific business role.

“We won’t get to a point where everything can be delivered through a single user interface in the short term, but it is coming,” says Chandler.

Data tsunami
The volume of digital data being created across the globe is growing exponentially, creating what is often referred to as a “data tsunami”. With increasingly sophisticated modelling tools and databases, there is a danger that a BI implementation will drown staff in the same informational tide.

But there is a difference between too much data and too much information, according to Chandler.

“A lot of organisations have too much data, but I don’t see a lot of organisations with too much information. Information is an appropriate use of data that can be employed to make better decisions.”

Increasingly, BI is owned and sponsored by the business, where it used to be largely contained within IT. It is the job of the IT department to keep pace with the market, and understand which of the diverse products available will provide the best overall blend to meet the business need.

“IT needs to be able to guide its internal customers through the landscape of available solutions, and avoid a fragmented portfolio,” says Chandler.

One of the first issues with which a CIO can be confronted is a requirement to produce a dashboard. But this is just the visible piece of a much larger information investment, and is only as useful as the quality of data being supported beneath it.

“When you say you want a dashboard, what you’re really saying is, I want an information infrastructure that can gather consistent data on a repeatable basis,” explains Chandler. The dashboard does not exist in isolation from the rest of the investment in BI, and it is in underinvestment, or a failure to understand this issue, that many of the pitfalls lie.

Roles and responsibilities
Bryan Cruickshank, KPMG’s head of global IT advisory, adds that understanding the strategy and engaging the correct functions are equally important.

“Those people who think this is a technology question are in the wrong space. This is about figuring out the type of strategy the organisation is trying to adopt, so the important questions are, what are the key performance indicators that need to be pulled together, what is the operating model that needs to drive the strategy, and what are the key roles and responsibilities within that?”

Gartner recommends implementing a steering group or committee to lead the BI initiative, and that group should comprise both technical and business roles. It should define and execute the BI strategy for the business, with investment shaped by strategy, and not the vendor.

“You need to invest in BI in the context of where the business is going. If the overall strategy is all around customer satisfaction and retention, obviously that has to shape any investment,” says Cruickshank.

Chandler adds that the danger lies in following a particular vendor’s road map. “Don’t fall into the trap of thinking: ‘We are an SAP-centric user, we’re going to evaluate SAP’s product portfolio to drive our investment.’”