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No matter what your position is in your business - a CEO, CFO, Sales VP, or line of business manager, you need information to base your daily decisions upon. And you need to rely on the accuracy and completeness of that information to confidently make decisions that are right for your business.
“Business intelligence” (BI) is no longer just the bastion of the very big companies, who can afford elaborate data warehouses to replicate their operational data and then send a staff of statisticians and business analysts to attempt to derive good information from those warehouses. The warehouse model is just not viable for most growing businesses.
“Continued stories about cost and time overruns continue to be a gating factor for smaller firms that understand the benefits of data warehousing projects," said Brad Marshall, Director of Commercial Products at Teksouth, a provider of data management and analysis systems. "They know the value that BI/DW systems can bring, but are scared by the prospects of the projects turning into a never-ending time and money pit, without clear deadlines in place that they know will be met."
Eschewing the cost and complexity of data warehousing then, growing businesses today are often stymied by the quality of the data they can obtain. Large or small, businesses require data about their operations that is both accurate and timely. They require real-time, actionable business intelligence for proactive management rather than the “management by hindsight.”
This Executive White Paper will outline the issues, the business ramifications, and the solutions for the business intelligence requirements of growing companies.
Key Definitions
When industry analysts and writers talk about “business intelligence,” what exactly are they talking about? If my financial package can create a report, is that business intelligence? What about Excel? Is a spreadsheet business intelligence? And are all numbers “analytics”?
First, all numbers are not analytics nor do they necessarily lead to any kind of “intelligence.” There are some clear definitional criteria that we can use to ensure we are really talking about BI.
1. Business intelligence is synthesized information that allows you to make an executive decision. It is not a list or just a single report of figures. Raw data is not necessarily business intelligence. Data has to be compiled or synthesized to become useful mission-critical information. Business intelligence is intended to provide foresight - not just reveal history.
2. Business intelligence is derived from real-time data. For true executive decision-making, the data used has to be up-to-the-minute real time data in order to accurately represent the state of the business. In today’s modern businesses, even yesterday’s data is “old” _ and in many fast-moving businesses, data a few hours old is too dated to make decisions upon. Batching data to upload it to a corporate computer, as one example, leads to the aged, out-of-date information that leads to faulty decisions. Data warehousing, as another example, replicates business data on separate databases, and by definition is not real-time.
3. Business intelligence, to be useful, stems from data derived from the integration of all key business processes. Your business has many interconnected facets: accounting, sales, manufacturing, warehousing, purchasing, bill collecting, management of your staff, your customers, your suppliers, and your partners. For your conclusions to be accurate, they must be the result of reliably accurate data collected and synthesized from all those facets of your business. Your business is “end-to-end” - your ability to extract critical data has to be end-to-end as well; it has to span the entire breadth of your company.
4. Business intelligence presents all users with a common version of corporate “truth.” Business intelligence has to be available to all those in your company who make decisions - not just lofty, far-reaching decisions - but even day-to-day operational decisions. It is imperative that the source for all your employees’ decision-making comes from a common repository of all business data. One version of the truth thus populates all resulting reports; staff can rely on the fact that data from any query or report will always be consistent and accurate.
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