Looking at new Business Intelligence
Business Intelligence or BI has been a buzz word in the IT industry for quite some time. But what does it really mean, and how can it help your organization better acheive its goals?
Business Intellegence to me is a method of reviewing organizational data to make informed decisions to benefit the mission of an organization. Using the data that an organization is collecting and generating during its usual process, the business decision makers (and others) can be empowered to make better decisions.
During Tech Ed last week I heard a comment about business decision making and thought about how I have seen it done. While it is true, that organizations should empower employees and value their input, the true test comes when an organization is faced with decisions that affect their comptetitive edge, and many times, those who work with the data directly are not included in the overall process of deicision making. It is beginning to be seen that the more involved the employees are in decisions that affect them, the better for the organization the decision can be. Making decisions in the executive suite, a.k.a. a vacuum, is usually not going to acheive the best results, but there are many organizations that continue to do things this way.
Tools to improve analysis
Many executives get reports from the employees who work with data and technologies. To me, the executive summary is just that, a short discussion of how a dataset affects an organization at the 15,000 foot level. But drilling into the details isnt something that happens at that level.
Using technology like Sharepoint is great, but if the reports shown to decision makers in their current form arent really being considered when decision time rolls around, what good will the tech do?
SharePoint is a technology that improves visibility of existing data to make analysis easier to handle for the employees who dig in enough and are familiar enough with the data to make sound decisions about it. For executives, it serves more to improve visibility, not analysis necesarily.
Take the tech to the analysts
In deciding how to improve BI within an organization, work with those who are in the trenches to prove the concept of an application like SharePoint. Once the capabilities of the application are proven and can be shown at the user level, then the discussions about licensing and cost can begin. If the approach is reversed, there will be no effective way to prove the usefulness of the application and a salespitch is not the best way to gain more BI and technology. The overall ROI may be low, and the benefits may be huge, but attacking the issue from the top down may well be a death sentence for the project.
If you take the time to pilot the idea with the users and analysts who work the data, your results may be tangible up front and convince the right BDMs that this technology will improve business, not just give IT a new toy to play with.
