This article offers five strategies on business intelligence to help you make prompt and informed decisions to achieve optimal business performance.
In today's challenging and uncertain economy, there is increasing pressure for businesses to dramatically improve decision-making ability. Business intelligence (BI) refers to technologies, applications and practices for the collection, integration, analysis and presentation of business-related information.
BI allows you to respond quickly to dynamic market conditions and compete effectively with your larger counterparts. It enables you to do just that by providing the critical intelligence for prompt, informed decisions vital to great business performance.
This is why performance management has emerged as a strategic imperative for some small to midsized businesses. You may need to grapple daily with issues that influence business performance, and rapidly gain the insights to deal with them efficiently and effectively. BI could potentially be the key answer to help you gain the competitive advantage against your competition, resulting in higher profits for your business.
As a business manager, what considerations or strategies should you take in order to obtain the right reports, dashboards/ scorecards and information to suit the needs of your business? The following five considerations will help to ensure that your business intelligence has the accurate, up-to-theminute view of the business so that everyone in your company can better collaborate in making sound strategic decisions.
Rather than taking an 'all or nothing' approach, you can deploy BI tactically and incrementally, connecting the initiatives together as they are added. Start by focusing on a key pain point, such as reporting, analysis or planning, and then adding additional capabilities as your business grows and requirements change.
The benefits are many: project rollout can match resource capacity and budget; there is quick realisation of business benefits; successful implementations provide justification for further investment to respond quickly by making rapid adjustments to changing business objectives.
All of us process information differently. As different categories of business users in charge of different workscope, we have distinct reporting needs too. You may wish to consider a BI solution that supports the following reporting functions.
Managed reporting distributes prebuilt reports across a business on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. It often provides flexible prompting so business users can run variations of reports themselves without the need to re-create the reports.
Ad-hoc reporting gives business users instant access and interactivity with information. This type of self-service reporting is simple to use, with drag-and-drop interfaces and information presented in the right context.
Analytical reporting allows business users to slice and dice information so that they can easily understand the 'why' behind critical issues, trends and opportunities. This function has the ability to explore detailed information further.
Dashboards and scorecards help measure business performance and quickly communicate complex information to business users in compelling visual formats. An example would be a point-in-time picture of performance to budget or a key performance indicator.
Production reports provide high-quality, detailed information in formatted reports such as invoices or statements.
Operational or transactional reports typically have detailed information from transactional systems. Ensuring secure and controlled data access is essential.
You need to ensure that different business function users get the correct information in the right format. That helps to increase the adoption of business intelligence across your business. It is also important to ensure that no duplication of work is needed to deliver the information to the different users.
A company's data is one of its biggest assets - second only to its human capital. The challenge lies in extracting the data from multiple sources and transforming it into useful and relevant information for the business users. Many businesses have more than one data source. As applications are purchased and deployed, the sources and format of data grow exponentially. Data may come from transactional systems, such as the Enterprise Resource Planning solutions, data warehouses or old legacy systems. You will need to access data from the multiple sources to address all the information needs and requests from the different users.
Another key success factor is to ensure that everyone in your company is working from the same data and using the same business rules. More often than not, business users are struggling to produce consistent results using manual processes, error-prone spreadsheets or different tools/queries to access the data.
To ensure data consistency and accuracy and that users are working from the same numbers, you should have one place to define the data and manage the business rules centrally, and a single query service to retrieve the data. When everyone works from the same data, business users will have confidence in the results.
With these strategies in mind, you can achieve optimal business performance with BI. When decision makers understand what is happening, why it is happening and what they should do about it, they can make sound, data-driven decisions at every level and across every business function.
- This article is contributed by IBM, Cognos Business Intelligence and Performance Management, a member of the Singapore infocomm Technology Federation (SiTF).
- This article first appeared in The Business Times on 18 November 2008 and information is correct at the time of publication.
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