A smarter way to use BI

The global economic downturn is forcing businesses to reassess their internal processes and rethink their strategies. Adding to this pressure are growing demands from stakeholders and regulatory authorities for greater transparency about finances, operations, decisions and core performance metrics.

But most organisations do not have the processes and business tools in place to make informed, responsive decisions. By 2012, analyst Gartner predicts that more than 35 per cent of the top 5,000 global companies will regularly fail to make insightful decisions about significant changes in their business and markets.

Research recently carried out by Sage Group suggested that about 90 per cent of organisations often get bogged down with low-value, seemingly trivial tasks, because of inconsistent internal information, and 44 per cent of these organisations still use spreadsheets and other manual processes to manage corporate performance. But in the face of the economic downturn, more organisations are looking to business intelligence (BI) and performance management initiatives to help transform and improve their organisation and to deliver greater business value.

Andrew Stevens, principal architect, in the mid-market division at Sage, warns that businesses often fail if they simply add in BI technology so that it becomes just another layer over the top of existing systems.

“Today, BI is seen as something that is run outside of a business process,” he says. “But it shouldn’t be seen as a standalone platform.”

According to Stevens, by embedding BI into other common products such as ERP (enterprise resource planning), CRM (customer relationship management), HR and payroll, organisations can benefit from a more holistic approach to BI.

This argument is echoed by Jon Ainsworth, director of business development at Oracle’s European BI solutions arm. “The way to look at BI is not as an additional IT layer, but rather as a way to unlock data that is held within the existing layers of infrastructure. BI turns data into information, that then can be used to drive decisions and change. It unlocks the inherent value held in operational systems ­ and actually helps companies better leverage their existing investments in ERP, CRM and other operational systems,” he says.

But while Gartner predicts that by 2010, 20 per cent of organisations will have an industry-specific analytic application delivered via software-as-a-service (SaaS) as a standard component of their BI portfolio, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to BI.

Sage’s Stevens points out that BI is many things to many people ­ to some it is seen as a reporting tool, to others an analysis tool. It can be used for planning ahead or for being reactive, or for answering “What if?” questions. But fundamentally, BI should be seen as a key technology for achieving a common organisational understanding and alignment to help move the business forward in a way that drives value.

Gartner says that over the coming years, hundreds of information aggregators offering SaaS analytic applications will emerge, but a virtual monopoly will persist within each vertical niche because of the high barrier to entry for others.

While Stevens acknowledges that SaaS can be useful if deployment is a cost issue and a company does not want to invest in dedicated servers, he suggests that no two implementations are the same because each company has different needs.
“The product has to be very usable. What do you want to get out of it? The answer is often very different for each customer,” he says.