Analysing business intelligence

Co-founder, chairman and CEO of Business Objects, Bernard Liautaud describes business intelligence as getting a single version of the truth. However, obtaining "this truth" can pose a significant challenge to organisations.

Altus Viljoen, business intelligence product manager at Bytes Business Solutions, takes a closer look at BI`s evolution - specifically analytical applications - and how a strong methodology can realise successful deployment.

Arguably, those companies that have been hit the hardest by the economic downturn are those that don`t have a strategy or methodology for gaining and keeping control over their business operations.

Business processes of the 21st century must be more efficient and dynamic in order to build and sustain value across the organisation and beyond.

BI has the potential to realise these goals, driving operational excellence and truly managing performance across the enterprise.

The underlying principle of BI, since its conception in the late 1980s by Gartner, is to enable companies to gather data and formulate information in order to derive knowledge.

Companies are, however, only now - more than 15 years later - understanding how BI benefits everyone that uses it. Plus, the growth of e-business and internal and external data along with operational excellence has kept the spotlight on BI.

In return, BI vendors have in the last few years made bullish statements about ROI (return on investment), BI for the masses and new efficiencies that simplifies deployment and adoption across organisations.

In reality, a lot of BI deployments have failed. Businesses need a well-connected enterprise BI strategy that actually helps manage and coordinate decisions.

The push to optimise business processes over the last six year or so has driven a new market - analytical applications - that focuses on reducing the time to analyse and leverage best practices.

These packaged applications affect horizontal areas like supply chain, ERP, financial and customer management, which subsequently mean they have their own data models and application logic.

Fortunately, next-generation analytical applications are already offering collaboration and data application integration for closed loop, data mining, visualisation, knowledge management and workflow capabilities to generate a new application foundation.

You can either buy these analytical applications out-of-box or build your own using development kits.

Indeed these applications will eventually cease to be called analytic applications as they become operational in nature. They will become the next class of enterprise business applications.

For better or for worse the industry is moving from BI to "analytics". However, analytics is still in essence in subcomponent or function and not a software market.

Another BI element, the mobile and wireless market is also offering a new opportunity for organisations. In the midst of the hype of the last year, mobile devices such as PDAs now feature user interfaces and connectivity option that can sustain real-world business use.

The most important thing to bear in mind when it comes to BI is that it is not about the technology, but about the methodology.

Unfortunately most organisations don`t understand where to strategically optimise their decision-making and operations - in an automated fashion.

Performance management can simplify this process as it focuses on optimising decision-making and ensures the collaboration of individuals in a strategic and tactical manner, which is aligned with business strategy.

Whether you build you own performance management methodology or use an existing one, a methodical approach to applying BI to your organisation is critical.

No matter how small or large the deployment, BI is the means to optimise your business decisions and actions throughout the organisation. You cannot afford to view BI as a nice to have - it is a strategic and mandatory piece of every organisation`s business operations.