Webinar: How to Achieve Greater Business Intelligence Agility

This is the transcript of a Webinar hosted by InetSoft on the topic of "Business Intelligence Agility" The speaker is Mark Flaherty, CMO at InetSoft.

This is obviously a hot topic today. We’re hearing all about agile in the context of business and the context of BI and a whole variety of contexts. The term certainly sounds attractive, but what does it mean and how do you get it? There is old business phrase, ‘who changes fastest wins,’ and that encapsulates why agility is attractive.

If you look at changes, it is possible to think in terms of having four layers where we should be concerned about change because changes in those layers are quite different. First, there’s a whole business eco system which is the global economy. This includes things happening on an international level whether wars or earthquakes or whatever can impact a business either in a small way or in a very large way either for a small period of time or a larger period of time.

Then there’s the eco system of your business, the sector of the economy in which you operate, and that is subject to its own context. Possibly more than ever, your marketplace has become very competitive. Does it have entrants from adjacent sectors, and in general how is that sector doing?

The third layer is your business processes. As time goes forward, companies are inevitably obliged to change their business processes, so they do. And nowadays that involves IT in a much bigger way than it used to. Finally there’s your business infrastructure, and that is what I would refer to as the IT level because an awful lot of business infrastructure nowadays is very precisely information technology.

So if we look at the general eco system including economic factors such as regulation, such as globalization, and that continues to be a factor in a fairly big way in actual fact. There’s competition in the sense of merges and acquisitions, market consolidations, divestitures, the entry of new competitors, and then there’s customers.

You have the evolving expectations of customers for new offerings and basically just the changing way in which customers interact with organizations. You used to have to meet with people face to face, and that’s not as true anymore. There are many other ways in which to interact with a customer.

Success comes from agility. It comes from effective branding. It comes from economies of scale. It comes from market dominance, itself. In other words once you get to be the leader, for instance, as Apple has managed to do in the smart phone market, then you get momentum that’s very difficult for other people to neutralize in any way.

Success also comes, strangely enough, from employee satisfaction. Of those success factors, really the only two that relate to IT are economies of scale and agility. So, that’s the second layer. And this is the kind of third layer. This is business process, but what I wanted to say about business processes is that certainly nowadays, and it’s been like that for quite a while I guess, but certainly nowadays, business processes are fundamentally linked to information technology.

This diagram shows the four components of any computer system, people, software, data, and hardware in a very general way. But a business process always passes through the people unless of course it’s a thoroughly automated process in which case there are no people involved at all.

The link between efficiency of a business process and IT is pretty obvious from this diagram, if you don’t get the infrastructure correct, if you don’t get the applications correct, if you don’t get the data well organized then the business process suffers according and the reverse of the coin is true too, if you get those things working well then business process works well for you.

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So, in terms of business process agility, this depends upon vision and leadership, staff skills, staff engagement and participation and the agility of technology. Some very interesting studies out there that link corporate success to good use of technology. But normally that’s not enough on its own. Normally you need some of these other things like business vision and leadership, which is of course possibly the most important factor.