BI now plays key role in meeting business strategy, says Synergy

Business intelligence (BI) analysis and reporting tools are now playing a key role in helping companies to align their business strategies with execution across all levels of the enterprise - from board and executive team level, through business units and operational management to workgroup supervisors and individuals.

This is what delegates heard at a recent executive breakfast presentation on a Balanced Scorecard Approach to Corporate Performance Management, supported by the use of BI, to track performance throughout today's complex organisations.

The presentation, hosted jointly by BI specialists, Synergy Computing and business consultants, Eigenon Consulting, also demonstrated the effective use of BI in CPM and its role in helping companies outperform their industry peers.

"Being able to measure and monitor performance on a daily basis ensures that the performance of everyone in an organisation is in line with the business' strategy," says Andrew Connold, managing director of Synergy Computing, which, together with Eigenon Consulting, develops business process management solutions supported by efficient BI reporting. Such solutions help organisations identify and track their critical success factors, ensuring that are aligned to the strategy and provide management with timeous and efficient feedback on business growth and performance.

"With BI tools companies today no longer rely only on lagging financial indicators to track business performance. They can also easily monitor leading performance indicators and take proactive steps, as necessary, to ensure desired results. It means managers can focus more on growing business rather than fixing historical performance," he says.

Previously, managers would get a monthly report showing how the company as a whole was performing. Now, by being able to analyse disparate enterprise databases such as financial, human resources and ERP, they can see all the factors impacting current and certain future performance.

By identifying the critical success factors around a specific strategy, management can determine the practical measures to be managed needed to ensure these critical success factors are achieved.

"The overall strategy might be to deliver an exceptional customer experience, with the goal being to retain more customers. One critical success factor could be faster repairs turnarounds. A KPI might be to have a 90% 24-hour turnaround. "You get what you measure. You have to reduce a strategic goal into practical performance measures, for which staff at all levels in the organisation are made accountable, and then provide the correct resources and environment, to get the job done. Such practical delegation of responsibility for strategy achievement aligns the whole organisation with the goal. However, it requires regular monitoring and corrective action, to ensure the achievement of the goal. It is in this efficient monitoring that such CPM often fails as the ease of monitoring and problem source identification is not easy without the use of an efficient BI solution," adds Connold.

Increasingly for industry-leading organisations, the Balanced Scorecard Approach to aligning strategy with the business is seen as the natural evolution of their enterprise-scale BI implementations. This is confirmed in a recent report from Gartner.

"CPM is an important concept, as it represents the strategic deployment of business intelligence solutions," says Gartner. (Source: Gartner, December 2001 Research Note)