Business Intelligence for Mid-Size Organizations: It's Not Just for Industry Giants

The following scenarios represent typical situations that could benefit from improved business intelligence (BI):

Multiple versions of the truth. Interdepartmental meetings frequently turn into shouting matches as participants argue about whose spreadsheet has the correct figures.

Inability to perform in-depth analysis. Your company knows which of its retail outlets have the greatest sales volume, but it doesn't know which products have the highest sales. Unable to locate important information. Fred in accounting mentioned that a report showing year-over-year growth for each customer has been posted to the company's intranet.

But you have no idea how to find it.

Lack of data privacy and security. Fred also mentioned that a report showing quarterly bonuses was recently posted. While you know how to find this report, you're shocked to discover you can view everyone's bonuses, not just your own-and those of the employees that report to you.

Business users shouldn't have to become technical experts. One of your more technical business users in the payroll department thinks he has mastered SQL. However, when he runs a query attempting to find all products with selling prices "less than $5 and greater than $1,000," he doesn't understand why no products meet this criteria.

Need for simple-to-use production reporting technology. Your accounting department uses a word processor to generate customer invoices. Customers frequently complain about being invoiced twice for the same purchase or shipment.

Existing BI technology is too difficult to use. Your company's sales manager used analysis tools at her former job that she insisted be used in your company as well. Although your company has invested in several licenses, users who have tried to use these tools have given up in frustration and rely exclusively on spreadsheets instead.

Historical values are not being retained. The sales department is conducting account reviews and wishes to compare each customer's sales-to-date this year with its sales-to-date at this time last year. Sales maintains a spreadsheet for this year's results, but the person who maintained the spreadsheet last year has left the company-and no one has any idea what happened to last year's spreadsheet.

Weak or nonexistent BI technology limits your company's operational flexibility. Your company has grown to the point where its customer base has expanded to the hundreds.

While it values every customer, it would like to identify the top 10 in sales volume each month and offer them extra attention and special incentives.

Inability to comply with government reporting requirements. While your company is still relatively young, it hopes to one day go public. In your role as IT director, you want to take steps now to provide proper audit trails and data lineage to ensure that your CEO and CFO have confidence in the accuracy of your company's financial numbers.

Lack of proper tools is negatively impacting IT productivity. As your company's IT director, you're proud of your department's ability to quickly respond to business user requests. However, you've started to hear complaints from your users that their report requests are not being resolved in a timely manner-and by the time they receive their reports, they no longer need them.

Inability to consolidate data from multiple sources for integrated information access.

Reports that require data from multiple operational systems are especially difficult to generate and frequently involve generating separate reports from each system, and then combining the results in a spreadsheet.

How BI Is Helping Mid-Size Organizations

BI, also referred to as "decision support," allows organizations to better understand, analyze, and even predict what's occurring in their company. BI helps your organization turn data into useful and meaningful information and then distribute this information to those that need it, when they need it-so they can make timely and better-informed decisions. It allows organizations to combine data from a wide variety of sources and see an integrated, BI helps your organization up-to-date, and 360-degree view.