Dimensions in BI - where does customer figure?

IT innovation has done wonders to Business Intelligence (BI) utility. Once what used to be a process for increasing the competitive advantage of a business by intelligent data sourcing and analysis has now become an inevitable management tool that pervades every corner of enterprise.

The industry is rapidly moving away from thinking about BI as a set of technology tools, according to Bill Hostmann, Research V.P of Gartner Inc. While BI in 2004 focused on querying, reporting and multi-dimensional analysis on top of a data warehouse, today's dynamic and competitive business environment demands a different approach.

"It's a very dramatic shift," Hostmann said. "It's not just about building a data warehouse and putting some reporting tools on top of it. It's about putting a much larger framework together that includes a much larger piece of the organization, and delivering more of these different kinds of analysis capabilities than you've had in the past."

I am glad dimensions of BI are expanding to include every facet of enterprise. But why stop at enterprise? The real test of its utility is how it tempts companies to positively impact customer experience. The customer needs no machine fed data to realize who cheats him and who doesn’t. Look at HP gouging customers on cartridge sales, Gillette on shaving products, enterprise IT vendors on ERP/CRM software that have been depreciated over decades. The day when customer feels he got real value for money, I could say BI has scored its maiden goal.

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Give us just so much BI that we need

Gartner Analyst Bill Hostman says valuing Business Intelligence(BI) is not an exact science and often comes down to mindset, comparing BI to a college education:

"It's not easy to persuade someone to go to college based on a purely financial or numbers game, and the same thing goes [for] BI," Hostmann said. "You just have to believe that BI is absolutely essential for you as an organization to investment, that this is a fundamental core competency that you have to have."

Hostmann suggests this question - "Do you have the information that you need to manage your business?" – as a metric for measuring user satisfaction.

I say BI software often floods a user with too much information [he hardly ever needs but pays for] that his decisions often veer off-track. Need to twist that question a bit – “How little information you need to effectively manage your business?”

In that you get an effective metric to compute ROI from BI software. Make users pay less since they get less. Need I tell you they are staring at a recession…?

Why does BI miss the mark often ?

Most corporations with major Business Intelligence (BI) deployments create large data warehouses or collections of data marts whose incoming data must be cleansed to ensure integrity and consistency — and whose relationships must be clearly defined in data cubes to ensure that analysis tools can run queries embedded in standard reports.

But if you start with that sort of architectural model, you’re likely to fail, says Scott Sognefest, a partner in Deloitte Consulting’s BI practice. “There’s a growing realization that you can’t put BI technology on top of a big pile of data. It’s expensive and inefficient,” he says. “You wouldn’t build a factory and then decide what products you want to produce after it’s built, but that’s what people do in the BI space.”

It’s an elusive goal one seeks between complex IT requirements that are expensive and practical user empowerment that’s fairly elementary. Interesting article from Infoworld here.

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