BI: A strategic investment approach

By David McWilliam, managing director of Cognos SA

Companies have, over the last three years, started regarding the implementation of business intelligence (BI) across the enterprise as a strategic issue rather than a department-level component or point solution to address a particular problem.

They want information that delivers an enterprise-wide perspective in a meaningful format in order to make better business decisions. BI is seen as a critical component of a larger corporate performance management (CPM) agenda. But while drivers such as compliance, legislation, global competition and the need to better understand business performance continue to propel the business case for BI, successful implementation requires planning and forethought.

From a business perspective, it is becoming recognised that a BI solution should ideally deliver visibility, accountability and predictability of business and market conditions as well as of the performance of an organisation.

Visibility offers insight across the enterprise and introduces a greater level of understanding across the board, while the increasing accuracy of available information and delivering a reliable view of the organisation`s past performance. Through this understanding, management is able to assign accountability for current performance and more accurately predict future performance.

Businesses have acknowledged that `raw` data is meaningless, yet if this data is elevated through a BI solution, it can be analysed and understood, thus resulting in `business wisdom`. The BI tenets of visibility, accountability and predictability deliver this business wisdom and may be achieved if the correct approach is taken.

Implementing a BI solution without first putting in place a strategic and business performance plan is akin to putting the cart before the proverbial horse. A vision or strategy provides a model outcome against which business performance and success can be gauged, while a BI solution provides a powerful tool to assist in achieving corporate performance management (CPM) goals. Implementation and execution must thus be aligned with strategy to ensure the true inherent strengths of BI are leveraged.

Historically, BI solutions were deployed as point solutions in line departments. Solution selection was determined by departmental management in isolation and a proliferation of dissimilar tools resulted. As BI solutions have evolved, however, their more sophisticated capabilities have made them strategic at an enterprise level, driving the involvement of senior management. Since multiple BI toolsets often provide different results, an accurate overview of the business is difficult to achieve. Standardisation thus becomes the order of the day. While consolidation delivers the primary benefit of a single enterprise-wide view of the organisation and single version of the `truth`, one system, one supplier, one support company and one set of skills also means lowered cost of ownership.

The necessity for a unified BI infrastructure is supported by Gartner in its research paper titled "7 Fatal Flaws of BI". The research is based on five years of study, is drawn from thousands of customer interactions and codified in the Gartner BI Framework. "Having an end-to-end solution is the future of BI and vendors now need to develop solutions that meet the needs of the enterprise rather than the department," says the researcher. "The selection of a `best-of-breed` product may provide a specific component or toolset but fail to deliver a comprehensive solution to meet the current and future needs of the entire organisation."

Instead, organisations should consider the value of an end-to-end solution to facilitate integration -- a critical factor if you want to keep the end result in sight, namely the realisation of the enterprise strategy and CPM.

That said, Gartner notes that all too often enterprises assume that a `one-stop-shop` solution will be both the most cost-effective and best solution for the business. The researcher warns against the assumption that major enterprise application providers will always address the entire information requirement.

The technical capabilities of a solution must be correctly leveraged to achieve business proficiency and supply the relevant business user with the correct information in a meaningful format. This is key to ensuring the inherent power of this tool is utilised to its full potential. Technically, a BI solution must feature reliability, flexibility, scalability and adaptability. While BI vendors are being driven to evolve their existing solutions to encompass a collection of toolsets and components that meet all enterprise demands within one solution, there are some critical requirements.

Ensure the solution offers scalability so that it will continue to support your needs as the company grows and the need for information increases.

* It must also be a flexible enough to allow the company to adapt and respond to changing market conditions.
* Accessibility is critical; you need a solution that allows its users easy and instant access to the correct information with the correct levels of security.
* Finally, you need your BI solution to be adaptable enough to integrate with multiple systems and applications and fit your existing IT infrastructure.

Careful consideration of these issues will assist you to make better decisions when embarking on a BI initiative - and get better results. Achieving a return on investment means benchmarking performance, clearly defining your goals and continually ensuring benefits are driven out through appropriate application and use of the BI solution. The vendor (and solution) you select needs to be focused on ensuring business resources and information is leveraged to best advantage - enterprise-wide.