Organisations are starting to rethink the business intelligence (BI) landscape as they feel they are not getting the value out of the existing approach, says John Brand, vice president, principal analyst, CIO Group at Forrester.
However, Brand says enterprises have to look at business intelligence as a process. He points out that most organisations are very process-orientated in areas like sales and services, but not in BI.
Business intelligence, or BI, is an umbrella term that refers to a variety of software applications used to analyse an organisation’s raw data. BI as a discipline is made up of several related activities, including data mining, online analytical processing, querying and reporting.
Companies use BI to improve decision making, cut costs and identify new business opportunities. BI is more than just corporate reporting and more than a set of tools to coax data out of enterprise systems. CIOs use BI to identify inefficient business processes that are ripe for re-engineering.
Where were you educated? In Nottingham and Manchester in England, after the family moved across from Northern Ireland where I was born.
Where do you live? We recently moved to Wadestown having previously lived in Mount Victoria, Wellington.
Sending your business data to an accountant to create a report is a thing from the past. More and more companies are deploying business intelligence suites to measure and manage their data in an immediate and collaborative way, accessible across the organisation.
With seven businesses in Christchurch, Dunedin and Invercargill, as well as wholesale warehouses and a distribution network covering the whole country, tracking and analysing business data is vital for Headquarters Hairdressing.
The New Zealand Automobile Association (NZ AA) used to send some 400,000 letters to prospective customers for its insurance business AA Life each year. The call centre would then follow up those letters with a phone call.
Two years ago, NZ AA deployed business analytical tools from SAS that identified which customers would most likely respond to such a campaign, and sent the letters to this group. As a result the volume of marketing mail has been greatly reduced, along with the number of follow up calls by call centre agents. Moreover, response rates have improved by more than 50 per cent and even doubled, says Mark McCabe, senior marketing manager for NZ AA.
IT budgets are not immune to the recession, having come under pressure as cost-cutting measures sweep through organisations.
However, one area appears to be thriving despite the deflationary times, or maybe thanks to them, if Gartner is to be believed: the market for business intelligence tools.
Bad project management can kill a company. One day a company comes in
with a bang and the next day it goes with a poof. In times like these,
With roots dating back to 1668, Merck is one of the oldest pharmaceutical and chemical companies in the world. It achieved ROI within one year of implementing a new business intelligence system from one of the globe's fastest growing BI software companies.
The need to analyse and market more than 50,000 chemical products alone, across 15 Asia Pacific countries, made it vital for Merck to find a suitable tool to make sense of the wealth of data and information enmeshed in its complex operations.
The saying ‘rust never sleeps’ could apply equally well to the deterioration of data accuracy and access within organisations.
Despite the use of ever-improved business intelligence (BI) and reporting tools; new data, created daily by different people, doesn’t always end up where it is supposed to.
The value of business intelligence is more than information dissemination. As Gartner's business intelligence (BI) research director, Neil McMurchy, notes, BI is "an umbrella term for applications, infrastructure, platforms, tools and best practices, which enable the analysis of information to optimise decisions and performance". Gartner backed this up with a survey that showed BI was clearly at the top of CIOs' technology priorities during 2007 (see table below).
"We believe that BI capabilities will become more pervasive in operational and workplace applications as organisations seek to use BI to lead, support decisions, explore, measure, manage and optimise their businesses and thereby drive business transformation," McMurchy said in a recent presentation.
One of the marks of a successful business intelligence software system is the ability to quickly produce consolidated summaries known as dashboards. The dashboards are, in turn, related to the growing trend of centralising data.
Brisbane-based Infohrm Group created a dashboard recently for the University of Southern Queensland, the Australian Catholic University and Swinburne University of Technology. It charts resource management, planning and productivity.
Every day the average Australian manager spends 67 minutes searching for information to help them do their job. Never mind that most of the data is available on corporate information systems - the challenge is still finding it.
A survey commissioned earlier this year by Information Builders found that in spite of this inefficient search for information, fewer than one in five organisations were using business intelligence tools to access corporate data. Yet 59 per cent of survey respondents believed better access to information would boost their productivity and performance.
Even when it comes to the most technical of choices (whether it be a new outsourcer or platform), any decision an IT manager makes will contain a mixture of intuition - that combination of experience, knowledge, and gut feel - and research and analysis. Tuning in to yourself could seem a little silly at first, but intuition is just as valuable as the latest facts and figures. Lynn Robinson, a Boston-based intuitive consultant, said.
"We're having to use intuition a lot more these days. Research and logic don't always give the right information or offer a decision quickly." One way to hone your intuition is to note how past gut feelings have come to you or paid off in the past. "Pay attention to how intuition speaks to you. That way, you can be ready for it the next time it happens," according to Robinson. But, said Dave Wallace, CIO for the City of Toronto, it's extremely important to operate your intuition on top of a solid base of your experiences and up-to-date knowledge.
