Benefiting from BI

The demands on businesses today are creating an ever-increasing need to obtain the right information from the right place and at the right time.

As such, short iterative delivery cycles in the business intelligence (BI) programme are essential to deliver value to the business at frequent intervals through short business-driven projects. This, while maintaining a long term strategy and focus through architecture and model compliance and strict data integration.

As such, BI should be a key business focus area for organisations to provide turnkey data warehousing, which allows for the analysis of business intelligent data - the key to thriving in a competitive marketplace and staying ahead of the competition.

Unfortunately, however, many organisations do not manage information properly and few see it as a corporate resource. In fact, most organisational resources are divided into money, manpower, machines and material, notably omitting information - with a host of systems, software products and management systems in place for each. As such, there are few systems and procedures in place for information alone.

In today's continually changing environment, applications and technologies that are able to gather, store and analyse data with the intent of ensuring businesses make more informed decisions, have become critical to thriving in a competitive marketplace and staying ahead of the competition.

Many organisations do not manage information properly and few see it as a corporate resource.

Nitesh Vallabh is a director at PBT Group.

However, these technologies are only enablers of business value and therefore, should not be implemented for the sake of implementing such solutions, but rather based on the assessment of the value and benefit the business would like to obtain.

Consider the fact that information management and as such, the central concept of BI, is to enable users to understand data quickly so as to make faster and more informed decisions and, ultimately, assess potential opportunities and risks more effectively. Surely then, the value that a BI or information solution can bring a company should underlie its corporate strategy.

Contrary to popular belief, BI has yet to become mission-critical or an integral part of an enterprise's operations, which is unfortunate - especially if one considers the competitive nature of business today.

As a result, while technology is important, it is the business strategy and in particular the information or BI strategy of an organisation focused on the deployment of information, which should eclipse any technology issue.

Surely then, making sound business decisions takes more than intuition - decisions need to be based on current and, more importantly, accurate information to put the intelligence back into the business.

Additionally, there needs to be a change in executive perceptions. Executives need to view information as a corporate asset. Similar to the approach that one does not deploy enterprise resource planning at the department level, one cannot deploy information management and BI at that level either.

What's more, 'self-service' BI initiatives need to be encouraged to empower users to run their own reports and draw up their own dashboards, using the information from the integrated enterprise data warehouse. The penetration of self-servicing can be measured by counting the number of self-sufficient power-employees.

In fact, the BI competency centre needs to evolve from a line of business function to an enterprise service. As such, BI needs to be removed from not only the business silos but also from the IT centre, to facilitate the formation of an enterprise information service unit.

Not only can BI improve the timeliness and quality of information, but it also allows businesses to better understand their positions, in comparison to their competitors.

Through BI, analysing changing market trends and customer behaviour becomes easier. Additionally, internally, communication can be enhanced and activities co-ordinated - allowing businesses to respond more quickly to changing demands.

When a BI system is well-designed, properly implemented and fully integrated into business, it is able to improve the company's performance, improve the customer experience and ultimately, positively affect the bottom line.

In essence, it is BI technologies that look at data to create information and reports that drive the future of business by giving businesses insight into the trends and preferences of their target market.

However, it is the value drivers that look to the technology enablers to create meaningful business value through a successful BI solution. As businesses increasingly move towards becoming custodians of their data and implementing cross-functional 'self-service' BI initiatives, not only will it ultimately prove to have a positive effect on businesses but consequently, have a fundamental impact on the world of business intelligence - it's future driver.