Quick-win BI a logical approach

The state of the economy is changing on a daily basis, and the ability to quickly identify how this affects your business is becoming increasingly important. The traditional approach of long-term, large scale business intelligence (BI) projects cannot be the main priority for organisations needing business value within a finite timeframe.

Ryan Jamieson, director at Microsoft Gold Certified partners, IS Partners, says there will always be questions relating to business efficiencies, such as reducing cost, improving services to customers and improving profitability.

"While BI aims to highlight key trends in the organisation, with the current economic downturn, factors such as profitability, margin and cost analyses benchmarking become all the more critical," he says.

"An accelerated BI implementation will alleviate the business`s pressing need to make more effective decisions quickly by delivering the right information to the right person, and at the right time."

He adds that the platform itself needs to be robust and user friendly enough to ensure business users are also able to quickly and efficiently access information relating to their operations.

"Quick-win BI is ultimately about ensuring the business need is met. Technology solution providers, however, often engage with IT departments who speculate about what they think the business user needs."

Jamieson says IT often employs the principle of "build it and they will come", a scenario that results in the implementation of superfluous technology in the hope that value will be ultimately derived. "This simply eats up time, confuses the business user and does not always address their requirement. These users mostly want straightforward, uncomplicated solutions to their most immediate problems," he says.

"BI, ultimately, is a business tool, not an IT tool, and users should not have to wait several months for a solution to be developed and deployed."

While an implementation can be greatly accelerated through tools that automatically generate required code, for example, identifying the business requirement and basing the implementation on these needs will ensure overall value is rapidly derived.

"Using pervasive technology, often already available to the organisation, can further ensure that users obtain information in the format they need, whether through the Internet, dashboards, scorecards or Excel, for example," Jamieson adds. "The ability to present information quickly forms an integral component of accelerated BI."

He adds that solution providers need to understand the business issues and engage with these users to successfully target areas where they experience the greatest pain-points. And, from there, determine the components that have the greatest impact if delivered quickly.

"A successful BI implementation is one that delivers indispensable information out to the business; the `nice-to-haves` have to be road mapped. Accelerating the process, from placing information from the source into the data warehouse, to the tools that allow end-users to get answers quickly, will ensure the business`s need is always met," he says.

"Once the basic business requirements have been met, it is often a quick process to implement the items on the business`s long-term BI roadmap."