This article continues with a discussion of the positive results from a successful business intelligence project.
Executives and management consultants agree that effective business process management involves pushing day-to-day decisions down to the line-of-business operations managers. This level of BI supports that by giving them access to information and tools that help them make decisions that improve the performance of their business. The chief benefit of moving operating decisions to this level is that it improves the quality and speed of the decisions. Making that move through new business intelligence can lead to several business benefits.
For example, you can increase revenue by using BI to create a more effective product mix, optimize distribution techniques or find better marketing partners. Business intelligence(BI) can enable you to manage target marketing programs better by being able to measure the responsiveness of various segments and recalibrating more quickly and precisely as you react to changes in demand.
You can control costs by using BI to reduce waste and scrap and to increase the productivity of materials and labor. You can find and evaluate less costly manufacturing partners or parts suppliers and determine how to utilize plant capacities more fully.
You can improve customer service by using operational business intelligence to create a more responsive call center operation or more responsive restocking programs. BI can help you bring new products to market more quickly or to clear inventory in a profitable way. You also can optimize shelf space to maximize product exposure at lower costs.
A combination of modern technology and careful management can remove barriers that stand in the way of a successful business intelligence project. The biggest barrier is lacking of end user self-service. The technology for new business intelligence projects is similar to old BI systems in that it gathers and presents information to users, but it is different in a few areas. New BI has to serve more and less technically oriented users, be more responsive to ad-hoc requests and be able to add new sources of data quickly as business models and product mixes change.
As well as accessing historical financial and operating data, new BI also makes heavy use of current transaction data, along with a range of data – both structured and unstructured – from other internal and external sources. Therefore, a powerful and flexible data acquisition system is a primary requirement of a modern BI system. It has to be able to access key data in real time and other data manually or automatically. It also has to be able to absorb unstructured data, and do all of this in a rapidly responsive way.
“Responsive” in this case means that users have to be able to specify where and when to get new data that was not previously included in the system. Decisions based on a business intelligence application often cannot wait for IT personnel to create a data acquisition project when new sources of information are necessary to support those decisions.
Presentation for modern business intelligence systems can use the same basic dashboard paradigm that is popular in older systems and retain the basic reporting capabilities. Those include the ability to drill down into data, to change the type of graphic being used and to move table columns around. Here again, however, modern BI requires certain changes.
The dashboards must offer more self-service for users. Just as they can’t wait for IT to make changes in data sources, users also can’t wait for IT to adjust the dashboards to present new types of data or to use data in a different way. Users must be able to access data on their screens quickly and manipulate it as soon as they need to.
At the same time as demand increases, the types of analysis available on the BI dashboards must be manageable for the users accessing this type of system. Most will not be technically competent enough to understand high-order statistical analysis, and they probably do not have time to wait for such calculations to be made. In addition, the larger number of users may necessitate, in order to keep the system responsive, a simpler analytical and graphical presentation environment. The analytical tools must be geared toward ad-hoc and what-if types of analyses, rather than the longer-term analysis and projection models used in old BI systems.
New business intelligence is sometimes called operational business intelligence because, if effectively implemented, it will be used throughout the operating side of the organization to improve its business processes. The right technology applied through the leadership and support of committed management will enable a company to operate as an intelligent machine that responds to inputs from its line managers, who use its feedback to improve their decisions. In addition to direct benefits such as those cited above, there are indirect benefits to new BI. The nature of this approach requires and facilitates greater intra-company and inter-partnership collaboration and integration, not just of data but of operations. That collaboration in turn can produce further discoveries about how to operate the business better. But the bottom line is of course the bottom line: new BI brings the day-to-day operations of the company and the line managers responsible for these operational processes in line with modern management by pushing day-to-day decisions down to them and placing before them the information and tools they need to make effective operational decisions. New BI improves organizational performance by expanding and localizing decision-making capability, eliminating latency, enabling collaboration and improving access to siloed data, all of which will significantly improve business performance.
But the bottom line is of course the bottom line: new BI brings the day-to-day operations of the company and the line managers responsible for these operational processes in line with modern management by pushing day-to-day decisions down to them and placing before them the information and tools they need to make effective operational decisions. New BI improves organizational performance by expanding and localizing decision-making capability, eliminating latency, enabling collaboration and improving access to siloed data, all of which will significantly improve business performance.
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