Real-time BI: An idea whose time has come?

Real-time business intelligence (BI) - understanding what is happening in your business right now as opposed to waiting hours, days or weeks for a meaningful view of your business - is being touted as the next step down the information highway. The market analysts are talking about a true 360-degree view of your business, including the then, the now, and the future from internal and external perspectives.

As competition increases, access to meaningful information has become a key driver of success. The traditional high costs of entry into this market have tumbled as visionary vendors focus on market sectors.

The simple fact holds true for all businesses: the sooner an organisation has meaningful information, the sooner it can act on it. If the organisation acts quickly, problems can be averted and opportunities optimised.

If information latency dilutes the value of the information, strategic and operational decisions will be made using gut instinct; they will be based on informal and unstructured processes. This will ensure that most important decisions are made in the dark as they are usually made under pressure and with limited information.

Running a business this way will ensure the business is reactive, moving from one crisis to the next as it reacts to the market. This will severely limit the ability of an organisation to create a learning culture, propagate best practice or effectively execute its strategy.

Clay Young, senior VP of ProClarity, says the business mantra is rapidly becoming "No Surprises!" With significantly tighter regulatory scrutiny today, and a punitive stock market attitude fostered by unscrupulous business people, organisations are now far more paranoid about the integrity of their business plans and models, and whether or not they are missing key business insights.

In turn, this is increasing the pressure on delivering information from any source in real-time and modelling and planning business moves in a highly controlled fashion. Gone are the days when an analytic solution was enough if it could tell you about what happened historically. Gone are the days when the planning environment provided no centralised control mechanisms.

Most businesses are running on historic data. This is like trying to steer a ship by looking at the wake. While there is no disputing the value of this information, trying to figure out where to go by seeing where you have been is limiting.

The 360-degree view of the business allows managers to look back at the history (the wake), look at the current business (looking directly into the engine room), and looking forward at the different plans, forecasts and scenarios (looking from the bridge at what is coming). This must all be done while considering current and predicted market drivers.

This complete view of the business allows all factors to be combined quickly and delivered across the company to ensure they are used to guide the business safely and quickly.

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There are six key drivers to decreasing the time to delivery of valuable BI information.

Familiarity: Information must be delivered in a familiar environment. The ubiquitous Microsoft Excel is, and is likely to remain, the delivery format of choice for information. This increases speed by ensuring low friction with adoption. In the world of real-time analysis and planning, the preferred tool for the majority of decision-makers is Excel.

Affinity: Increase user adoption of the solution so the solution does not wither on the vine. If the solution is not readily adopted, the deployment will often not roll-out beyond a core number of users. Business users must be comfortable using the solution effectively and they must want to use it.

Uniformity: Alignment and consistency of data must be ensured. As the information available expands, a single view of the truth remains the most important factor in making the information usable to the business. All areas of the business must be working towards the same goals, using the same metrics and key performance indicators, and be executing the same strategy. Presenting users with different, inconsistent views of the business will ensure limited adoption.

Simplicity: The solution must make the data accessible to the normal business user. As such, the information must be presented in a simple, understandable and actionable format.

Productivity: Business users must be empowered to control their own destiny without going through the traditional IT bottleneck. They are looking to improve their productivity by getting the information they want, when they want it. As ProClarity`s Young says: "The leading cause of lost productivity for many decision-makers is tracking down, acquiring and integrating the data they need simply to begin their analysis. A majority of business people spend 80% or more on information acquisition and 20% on information analysis."

Visibility: Hidden trends and unknown problems are the cause of many difficulties in business so providing information to the decision-makers on time and in a format that is understandable is important. Organisations must have a bird`s eye view of the business to allow trends to be identified, flagged, and made visible at any level in the organisation.

An agile organisation will be able to access the right information, in the right format, in enough time for it to be useful. The days of managers ploughing through reams of reports to find out what goes on in the business are a thing of the past. The real-time organisation can see what is going on now, what effect it will have on the future plans and forecasts, and what answers may lie in past events.

The technology and business markets are ready to take this exciting step down the information highway, on condition that the business case is sound and management understands the value.

Solving any technical issues to enable real-time business intelligence is not a "silver bullet" and the changes to the culture of the organisation will require careful management and executive support. However, people issues remain the largest factor impacting on the successes of real-time BI. Choosing the right technology cannot solve people issues, but it can certainly go a long way to ensuring the next step is as fast and painless as possible, delivering all the value desired. The idea of real-time BI is not new; it is just a good idea whose time has finally come.

Keith Jones is MD of Harvey Jones Systems, a local specialist in financial, business intelligence and business performance management solutions on the Microsoft platform.