Perspectives & Strategy

Business Intelligence is recognised as the number 1 corporate priority for most CIO’s. There is much press on this subject at the moment, which is leading to a few of the solution providers to critique why there is a perceived failure to deliver the right solutions. I am looking to examine this from an independent standpoint and assist corporations make informed decisions to improve their capabilities.

According to Gartner most companies have failed to translate this high prioritisation into high value. Many knowledge workers are frustrated with the tools they have to work with right now. Some of the issues highlighted include:

◊ Lack of connection between BI offering and corporate strategy

◊ Lack of connection between BI and business processes

◊ Governance problems

◊ Skills needed for BI tools.

In addition to the Gartner analysis Oracle has recently published a white paper entitled “A new Model of Business Intelligence”. Oracles report highlights the following concerns:

◊ Complexity of legacy BI solutions

◊ Providing the right information to the right people

◊ The split between analytical solutions and other report data

◊ Lack of integration to operational applications

I agree that each of these problems are a concern. Oracle takes the view that “Early BI was complex” and that was the root cause as to why BI failed to address the needs of C-level, VP Level needs. In my view few BI vendors offered tools that were flexible and could address the needs of strategic, tactical and operational needs, but also many of the deployment teams failed to understand the structures necessary to support effective BI. Much of this requirement is about the varying levels of complexity required across the organisation.

Operational, Tactical and Strategic Decision Making

The needs for strategic BI and very different than the needs for operational BI, yet the data should all be sourced from the same place. The lack of connection between the BI tools and corporate strategy comes about because BI projects rarely start here, they normally focus on tactical or operational questions. It is rare to find a vision that encompasses corporate strategy. This is clearly an implementation issue and the team needs to focus on the right goals. In my earlier article “The Advantage of Good Business Intelligence” I stated that “The aim of most corporations is to run their organisations with minimal cost and use informed decisions in order to give them a competitive advantage” and “The aim of the BI solution is to empower the business community with mission critical information at the time when decisions need to be taken”. Also in “Leveraging Information to Create a Competitive Advantage” I stated that BI “is a competitive resource that is in increasing demand in the business environment today” and “improves the decision making process”.

The types of decisions made will differ according to the perspective of the decision maker. Which means we must cater for the decision maker at the operational, tactical and strategic levels. Whilst we have built a single version of the truth, we have not started the deployment by creating a standardised definition of what all the metrics are and how they are calculated (where necessary), e.g. we see multiple definitions of “gross margin” across the corporation, when there should be a single definition, used everywhere.

BI tools are rarely deployed across the whole enterprise, they typically focus on the cutting edge needs of the power user, the analyst community within the business. For everyone else? Yes they use the familiar old tools like Excel and Crystal Reports. No one has considered where this data should come from so it rarely attracts the same level of scrutiny as does the Data Warehouse. “I got it from the Order Processing System” declared one manager when questioned about his source. Of course in building the Data Warehouse the project team discovered that not all orders are processed through the Order Processing System, the logic to process these orders never made it into the scope of the operational reports. So the corporation has not taken the steps to implement a truly holistic understanding of it’s data.

The has come about either because the implementation team failed to understand how to correctly implement BI or it failed to spread the initial implementation  across the corporation as the single source for all reporting. Excel is a great tool for messaging data and driving out meaningful results, but used against the wrong data set the effort is wasted.

Contrary to Oracle’s opinion the BI tools of 5 years were not incapable of producing the right results, simply certain vendors, and I do include Oracle here, failed to sell the right product to do the right job. Plenty of older BI tools were capable of driving strategic, tactical, and operational BI components even at that time, combined with an effective data source, correctly designed, the Data Warehouse. It is true that many enterprises fail to put the BI tools into the hands of the business decision makers that would most benefit from them. This is the very information that the C-level executives and vice presidents require in order to make informed decisions and it here where the next expansion of BI should focus its efforts.

Both reports make proposal that purport to be new, but in-fact merely highlight concepts that have been around for some time. In 2002 I managed a project for a Telecom company that implemented real-time, actionable decision making integrating the BI solution into the Sales and Customer Service tools impacting the script used when dealing with the customer community. The script was BI driven and when the customer called in it would recognise them by their cell or home phone number then match out a demographic profile in order to manage the call for either customer retention or up-selling. This is how BI and business processes should be connected.

Of course this type of capability rests heavily on a well structured infrastructure at the heart of which is a metadata based enterprise information architecture, which will allow employees at all levels in the corporation to improve performance through business intelligence.

At the end of the day neither Oracle nor Gartner are correct in their supposition that earlier tools were incapable of delivering the right results to the right people at the right time. Having managed many successful deployments I am now seeing these companies merely catch up with solutions I deployed 5 or 10 years ago.