The BI Pentagon of Success: Challenges, Action Points and Benefits of Implementing a Business Intelligence Solution

Business Analytics, Executive Decision Support System or Corporate Performance Management can be used, on occasions, to describe Business Intelligence (BI). As per Gartner’s definition, Business Intelligence (BI) is an umbrella term that includes the applications, infrastructure, tools and best practices that enables access to the analysis of information; assisting in the optimisation of decision-making and performance. BI helps businesses to maximise the ultimate value of its data whilst enhancing its visual appeal.

Attempting to comprehend information in a business can be a demanding and complex process, as data can be hidden underneath many layers of multiple systems, across the whole organisation. Business Intelligence will help facilitate the organisation to make optimal decisions at the right time. However, BI Solution has often been considered an expensive option, a time consuming and problematic proposition to implement even for efficiently organised businesses in the market. Referencing Gartner study, 70-80% of BI projects fail.

Fortunately, the utilisation of BI, in the last decade, has rapidly improved. Modern technologies like Cloud Computing and In-Memory Analysis, coupled with new commercial business online models like Software-as-a-Service , mean Business Intelligence is now an efficient option providing a lower risk, decrease in cost and fast, effective implementation. Therefore making BI ideal for solving issues at a departmental level and in mid-sized businesses.

This quote stresses the important role BI can play in comprehending your business. “Putting a value on understanding your business in detail is impossible, as it is priceless.”

TOP FIVE – Challenges

1.      Accessing obscure business information: - The information is located in various areas, across different systems and spreadsheets. In order to maximise the potential effectiveness of BI, your data must be both current and truthful.

2.      Transforming raw data into useful information: - This method requires the application of business rules and complicated processing. The prospect of confronting such challenges with an orthodox setup and limited skill-set will raise doubts in regards to accepting BI as a business tool.

3.      The BI reporting interfaces: - The BI reporting interfaces are often difficult and require technical expertise. This could create the impression that normal users cannot operate BI as a business tool.

4.      Traditional managers: - Traditional managers may invent and refine their own Management Information Systems (MIS) in a self-serving, restrictive fashion. This can have a negative effect, creating a conflict in results and unreliable conclusions.

5.       Reporting and data entry points: - In many organisations, reporting and data entry points are manual, infrequent and possibly even arrive late. It is vital that businesses are kept up-to-date in order for organisations to optimise their decision making process. Non-availability of instant data and a high density of online information systems or interfaces are key challenges that a BI operator has to encounter.

TOP FIVE – Action Points

1.      Work out the details: - At a micro level, finding the location of data on different servers and technologies.

2.      Identifying correct data extraction: - Discovering what data is necessary to extract, so that important reports, BI dashboards or intelligence systems are being developed through BI application, which will assist in making quick, effective and intelligent decisions.

3.      Conversion of data: - The data is converted into a simplified format, so that it is easy to use, synthesise or manipulate, in order to generate good insights or storyboards.

4.      Utilisation of calculations and business rules: - Calculations and business rules are required to transform raw data into an explicit business tool, providing relevant insights and revelations.

5.      Strategise: - Strategising involves a process of bringing together all of the relevant information. An example of this procedure is found when analysing sales; and you want invoices joined to customers, products and sales representatives.

TOP FIVE - Benefits

1.      Actionable Intelligence: - One of the main advantages of BI is its ability to provide actionable intelligence to any kind of business entity. It is an efficient tool, which not only supports the organisation’s legacy database but also equally and effectively handles new types of data sourced from different locations, websites, social media, mobile applications and other platforms.

2.      Speedy Answers: - BI applications have comprehensively evolved from initially generating the intelligence from a relatively small subset of data, with only specific specialists able to access the data and capable of interpreting the information. As a result, the business would identify an issue and the specialist would respond in a few days with a potential solution. However, with intelligence built into the Business Intelligence applications, the decisive results and visualisations are prompt in nature. A quick response time to meet the fast changing dynamics of modern business.

3.      Decision-making made into real time phenomena: - Business Intelligence solution has the capability and strength to present results in real time. It is not limited to helping us understand the history of data, but also points to predictive elements of the future, on a real time basis. It provides a clear vision for the future whilst allowing businesses to take action today. This can help organisation’s shape the future to its advantage; at least covering the areas which are within its scope, obviously setting aside external, uncontrollable factors.

4.      Data Visualisation: All BI tools, without exception, come with a fully-fledged visual framework, with endless possibilities to display the data in its graphical form. Understanding the relationship between the past, present and probable future of an organisation, is a defining strength for any Business Intelligence solution. There are large selection of visual formats and chart types available in packages to highlight the data point’s correlation and potential hidden causal properties.

5.      Information Integration:-Data tends to be displayed in an unstructured, sporadic fashion; confined in the various silos of an organisation. The latest wave of BI tools is attempting to remove the barriers between those silos so that a holistic picture is formed based on multiple data sources. This not only helps in integration of business wide data sources but also facilitates improved predictions, calculations based on divergent permutations and combinations of data points.

Maninder Singh is a leader in Cloud Business Intelligence and Analytics with more than a decade of experience. He is the author of the Flagship Model: The BI Pentagon of Success. Many thanks to Hannah Jones and Harpreet Singh for their contributions to this article.

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