2 Compelling Values to explore Business Intelligence (BI)

The term business intelligence is now-a-days heard more frequently than even 2-3 years back. Lot of companies are getting interested in understanding, planning and executing some sort of a BI strategy to keep them aligned with the trend or to move ahead of their competitors.

Why this rush and what values BI brings to an enterprise, remains a question in the minds of many who might not have got the opportunity to get exposed to BI that much.

As I view it, at a macro level BI brings couple of distinct values to an organization by way of “speed” and “quality” of decision making.

1.      Speed of Decision-Making: In today’s world, speed is a competitive advantage. If we delay in grabbing an opportunity, somebody else will grab it. That opportunity can be from any functional domain. Like, it can be a business opportunity. One of the areas to focus here could be lead-to-opportunity pipeline by way of a more rugged CRM or sales force automation, which can help us getting the field pulse. A BI tool can leverage the CRM to make an analytics platform to provide the desired inputs for faster decision making by way of other strategies in terms of deal or pricing or account-mapping or the likes. It gives us an advantage if can act faster than the competition. That opportunity can be from other functions as well, like supply chain or product development. BI can help them all.  That’s a clear value comes out of BI.          

2.      Quality of Decision: For anyone to make a quality decision, he needs certain inputs. The more complete and objective those inputs are, better the quality of decision, as we know. Let’s consider that to take a decision, we need 5 inputs. If only 2 inputs are available while taking the decision, which cannot be deferred, what do we do generally? We do our best to make an intelligent guess and assume something (based on intuition or gut-feel) for those 3 missing inputs. And, we take the decision. If BI can provide those 3 missing inputs accurately & quickly, the quality of that decision could have been far better. That’s the value of having BI.     

BI starts with capturing facts, storing them in the form of data, analysing them (dicing / slicing, relating etc.), and providing access to data to help enterprise-users make informed business decisions. BI applications include the activities of DSS (Decision Support Systems), Query, On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP), Analysis, Forecasting and Reporting. Data Mining is definitely a part of it, though. Accurate (higher data quality) & current (latest / most updated) data are the pivotal points for making a BI work effectively. And, then only the business decision can truly be called as “informed decision” in every sense of the word.

A comprehensive BI, therefore, can help an enterprise making high quality decision @ high speed.

[The author was Director – Business Intelligence of a US Multinational Organisation (operating in the ICT space) for 3 years covering Asia Region as one of the early-adopters way back in 2008]

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