Once an application-specific endeavour that was too narrow to impart really meaningful benefits on corporate performance, business intelligence (BI) is now being expanded deeper into the organisation to enable enterprise-wide business analytics and astuteness.
However, when broadening BI to encompass the entire organisation, be aware of the impact of lead and lag indicators, as one limits the value of business intelligence implementations while the other makes BI truly valuable. Also ensure that buy-in is achieved at the highest levels in the organisation.
Lag or lead?
Most operational and financial values are lag indicators, telling the business how it did, rather than how it will do. The benefits of this at an operational level are linear and limited. Traditionally, businesses focused too heavily on information they drew from their operational systems. These lag indicators are useful in gaining an understanding of the business at a given point in time, and may provide some insight into how to move forward, but by their very nature the information they highlight is old and non-strategic, providing data that merely reflects the reporting period in question while providing nothing on which to act.
Lead indicators are soft measures such as customer satisfaction and loyalty, or the competitive, economic or political landscapes, and they provide strategic information that can be used to guide a business in moving forward.
Buy-in
At a strategic level, the benefits of BI can be exponential, provided the value of the implementation is realised at the right levels. This is only possible if executive sponsorship drives the project.
Executive awareness and sponsorship of BI projects is only now being achieved in SA. As the market becomes more competitive, and differentiating between services and products more difficult, gaining a better understanding of your market and leveraging this will be one of the main ways of gaining advantage going forward.
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Harvey Jones Systems (HJS) was established in SA in 1997 as a specialist information delivery company focusing on financial, business intelligence and business performance management solutions on the Microsoft platform, using SQL 2000 Analysis Services as the deployment mechanism.
HJS distributes a number of best-of-breed software packages, the flagship being ProClarity. Its solutions are all based exclusively on the Microsoft platform and it has become the dominant player in this sector in the region with over 100 customers, scaling from small to the largest deployments. HJS is an award-winning company, and its team has a solid understanding of the products it supports and the business issues faced by users deploying these types of solutions.
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