Johannesburg, 27 Jan 2009
Many in the corporate world view business intelligence (BI) techies as troublemakers.
For instance, the person in charge of Toyota`s shipping operation in 2000 was probably in a lot of hot water when a BI project uncovered that the automobile giant had double-paid its shippers to the sum of $812 000.
A casino discovered, after a BI project tried to excavate data from its operational database, that none of the backups, faithfully conducted over a five-year period, had worked. The IT manager wasn`t the most popular guy in the room.
Shortly after the turn of the century, South African cops used BI forensics to catch a gang of cash-in-transit thieves. They secured the records of all the cellphone calls made in the area at the time of a heist and used them to track the culprits, after they liased with one another regarding the attack via mobile phone.
In another case, a financial institution used forensic BI to expose fraudulent activities between some of its employees in the home-loans department and others at the conveyancing attorneys and the valuators. They probably weren`t too chuffed with the BI guys either.
But then that`s why companies acquire BI in the first place. They want to improve their decision-making and processes, cut costs and identify new business opportunities. They want to root out the bad apples and sharpen their insight.
While one of the oft-quoted causes of failed BI projects is cultural challenges, in many cases there are people in the IT department, such as those who implemented the "big, expensive, do-it-all" transactional system, who are shown in something less than a stellar light after the BI guys have settled in. Slack salespeople too. In fact, anyone who`s under-performing is exposed when the BI guys come to town. And they`re likely to object.
But those who are performing well, the heroes of the organisation, will also be exposed.
The BI guys don`t set out to ruin everyone`s day. They`re doing what they do best: exposing information locked in data to help the business get better, respond better and perform better.
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