Appropriate business intelligence (BI) strategies and deployments can generate excellent returns in a variety of sectors, but must be managed correctly and guided by best practice BI principles.
This was a central theme to emerge from the Oracle BI City executive forum, hosted by ITWeb in Rosebank on Wednesday.
Chris Marais, principal analytics consultant at Navigor, pointed to eight key steps in the BI process: planning, defining the processes that need to be implemented, discovering, designing, configuring and building, validating and testing, deploying, and sustaining.
Running parallel with this process, he told delegates, are four key elements that must be considered for any BI deployment to be successful, and remain so.
"There must be executive belief in, and sponsorship of, the technology," noted Marais, pointing to an example of WestBank in Austria, "whose CEO regularly speaks publicly about how his company is extracting value from a BI strategy".
Added to this, the BI design must cater for adaptability and resilience. The information must be reliable and trusted by the organisation's key decision-makers. "If the system's not reliable, the morale and the level of uptake within your team will be low," he explained.
Finally, those responsible for implementing the strategy need to listen to the business; as Marais noted: "The moment you stop listening to the business is the moment the BI strategy stops adding extra value."
The implementation approach at Navigor, he said, involves focusing each phase on specific objectives, producing meaningful results, testing new ideas in a "low-risk" environment, and allowing client personnel to "learn by doing".
Evolving BI
Nick Whitehead, Oracle's EMEA business development director for BI and data warehousing solutions, spoke of the need to adjust to the evolving role of BI within the organisation, especially large organisations.
Real-time, predictive data is replacing purely historical data, as a previously fragmented view of BI is evolving into a unified, enterprise view, he said.
"Organisations have often implemented BI using a variety of tools, integrated with underlying systems that are managed by a number of techniques - resulting in no cohesive view of the enterprise as a whole."
Simple analytical reporting, he continued, is evolving into "insight-driven business process optimisation, as companies increasingly see the need for better management of their critical information dimensions".
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