Business Intelligence for Everyone – Part One

No one disputes the value of informed decisions in today’s business world. Gone are the days of guessing through and groping in the dark while making decisions, either through the lack of actionable information or the lack of tools and resources to manage the organization’s data and gain actionable information. Organizations today rely more and more on BI systems to give them the information they need to perform their business operations.

However, just as important as it is for every organization to actively seek to make use of their data and develop or deploy systems and tools to process data into information, so is it imperative to ensure that everyone has access to the resultant information.

Traditionally, business intelligence has been the domain of a few experts who use complex BI systems to crunch data and make the results available to concerned stakeholders. And not many people had any complaints either. Some of these BI systems were so complex for process and functional heads to understand and operate and they were happy leaving it to the experts and receiving the information they need in the prescribed format.

This is really not the ideal way to get value from data however, and highlights the gap between the internal customer and the BI expert. The BI experts are just that – experts with the tools and systems. While they are well-versed with, and understand the systems they use, they have little to no process knowledge to give their internal customers any great insights. The internal customer does not know what can be measured and what can be gained as he has no idea about the scope or capability of the BI system while the BI expert cannot offer more as he does now know much about the process to suggest anything to the internal customer or offer any new insights apart from those the customer already requested.

We’ll talk about this situation and its remedy in the next post.