Shelley Cooper, Business Development Manager for Oracle South Africa, says business intelligence (BI) is top of mind among MDs and CEOs that are running successful companies today.
More and more organisations are looking to business analytics to increase their revenue and profitability, lower operational costs, interact more effectively with their customers and, most importantly, reduce overall business risk.
In fact, enterprise BI today provides greater insight to users into all levels of their corporations than ever before, ranging from executive management, right through to `line of business` managers and staff.
BI technology has evolved to the point where these tools are moving analytics and decision-making capabilities to the next level. The convergence of BI and reporting, dashboards and other visualisation tools, as well as the technical infrastructure to manage enterprise-wide performance information, provide a platform for users to get business valuable insight in near real-time from the massive amounts of data stored in transactional processing systems that were traditionally locked away in departmental silos.
Additionally, BI usability has increased dramatically, as have all applications on the Web, making casual business consumers of analytics more effective at quickly understanding `out of the box` solutions and navigating the data to find the root cause, identifying the next plan of action for their tasks at hand.
Deploying analytics out to all consumers of information at every level in an organisation - pervasive BI - provides several measurable benefits. Users can monitor a set of personalised key performance metrics, which provides a constant reminder of the overall corporate strategy and their overall role in executing on that strategy. It also gives them the ability to stay the course in strategy execution and enables real-time decision-making.
That said, a cultural aspect of analytics in a corporation must allow for the dissemination of business-critical data across and between departments and potentially to customers and suppliers. In many organisations, users keep departmental information close to their chests. Enlightened organisations have a culture of sharing and collaborating based on business insight and train line managers and staff to use it. But they have the necessary technical infrastructure to secure and audit access to important or sensitive information such as sales data, health records or salary information, for example.
How they do it
Organisations today are deploying an integrated business intelligence strategy focusing on performance management, where strategy is formulated using budgeting and business planning applications.
Tactical measurements and key performance indicators provide a feedback mechanism to ensure all users understand and execute the strategy and also monitor how the strategy is being deployed, identifying potential adjustments or refinements to the strategy.
Producers and consumers
Users that produce information generally comprise 10% of those in the organisation who create reports or models which are deployed broadly to `consumers` in the business community. These `information producers` consist of business analyst and other knowledge workers who enhance, aggregate and report on information using BI tools to create and customise role-based reports and dashboards, supported by IT.
Information consumers are business users who regularly view reports and dashboards for decision-making but do not do heavy number-crunching on a daily basis. They can be executives, managers, line of business managers, operational staff or even external users. Information consumers are a large group served by technology, including dashboards, guided analysis, interactive reports (OLAP, parameterised, linked or searchable) and standard management reports. Most of these tools provide a Web interface to promote ubiquities access and ease of use so deployment can go deeper into organisations.
Conclusion
As BI continues to emerge as an important capability with users having an operational focus, organisations must deploy an integrated BI strategy focusing on strategic planning and analysis, predictive modelling and other techniques to develop their corporate strategy. From there, operational measurements are taken as a feedback mechanism to understand how the strategy is progressing and what adjustments need to be made to the plan.
In closing, BI is no longer reserved for a small group of business analysts identifying anomalies in a prior results period. BI is emerging as a critical technology in providing business value throughout the organisation.
Share