Report reveals BI benefits

Johannesburg, 21 Apr 2009

A report by IT research and advisory organisation Butler Group questions how enterprises will survive without investing in business intelligence (BI) solutions.

The report, entitled 'Business intelligence - corporate performance management', highlights the importance of BI and corporate performance management (CPM) software in giving a business the tools it needs to re-energise company performance.

According to Butler Group, CPM can play an important role in controlling costs, optimising resources, and ensuring that business units are adding value. It adds that BI is crucial in performance management, by giving companies neatly packed and accessible information in order to better understand performance indicators through discovery, analysis, and ad hoc querying.

“Good decision-making and performance management are key to business value generation but neither are easy in today's complex world,” says Sarah Burnett, senior research analyst at Butler Group and lead author of the report. “BI and CPM solutions help firms answer three key business questions: 'How are we doing?', 'Why are we doing this?', and 'What should we be doing next?' “

For companies to re-energise corporate performance, she says, it is key that managers balance becoming more customer-centric with motivating staff.

“The old adage 'customer is king' has never been more relevant to business than it is today,” says Burnett, who believes strengthening performance requires management to consider not only customers' needs, but those of employees.

According to Burnett, BI technology has become closely linked to CPM software, joining the discipline of BI with enterprise budgeting and planning. This gives the organisation a window into performance and the ability to compare expectations with reality and actual performance.

Butler Group says CPM delivers a series of metrics that allows the organisation to achieve an accurate and balanced view of performance. It adds, however, that this differs for each organisation and business unit, which need interpretations of performance based on their specific goals and targets, and so require different performance measurements.