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Business Intelligence is often defined as the array of processes and technologies that turn information into insight and action, meaning the effective application of the broad suite of data analysis tools and analytical approaches to effectively understand, predict, optimize, and prepare to take action upon current and future business activity.
BI applications find their way into a vast range of business areas including customer relationship management, external market assessment, supply chain analysis, human resources, enterprise resource planning, financial management, research and development, as well as the various quality control activities such as Six Sigma. They employ technologies such as: data mining, text mining, geographic information systems, language translation, statistical analysis, predictive modeling, simulation, and advanced visualization.
Business Intelligence software allows companies to access their databases and deliver insights to employees, managers and business partners. The insights provided by BI then turn into actions as companies use BI applications to find new opportunities, reduce costs, reallocate resources and improve operational efficiency.
BI applications allow business persons to make informed decisions by providing timely, relevant and accurate answers to business questions. They do so with the help of analytical insights ranging from intuitive, graphical dashboards to highly formatted operational reports.

The business performance improvement cycle

Improving business performance often starts with setting priorities, by answering questions such as: Which business areas need the most attention? In which areas can results be enhanced with reasonable resources and effort?
Through the use of BI Applications, organizations gain improved insight and make more rational resource prioritization decisions each day. By monitoring business results and fine-tuning business actions, organizations create a system and culture of continuous performance improvement.
Intelligence in Business today is applied to 3 distinct and interrelated business needs – Monitoring the business, Reporting on the business, and Analyze the business. Monitoring BI applications constantly track business metrics to inform and alert the persons responsible about ongoing business activity and the decisions that might be required based on them. Reporting BI applications deliver detailed data on current and historical operational performance so managers can see what is happening across the enterprise, and how well the business is operating. And, finally, Analysis BI applications present views of the business from many different angles so that managers can uncover the causes of performance problems, uncover opportunities that the business should exploit, or predict business results.

by Iulian Lixandru

BITSoftware BI Consultant

Even in the case of extremely small businesses, a strategic deployment of a Business Intelligence solution can have major impact on the growth and profitability of the company. Having a clear view of the profitable customers, products, regions and market segments is fundamental to understand the causes and expand upon the successes. Equally important is to find those customers, brands, markets, segments and competitors responsible for draining cash and quickly stop the bleeding.
- Should we treat all customers equally? (If you say yes, I’d suggest reading “Angel Customers & Demon Customers”)
In a company that has more than thirty customers, the Pareto Principle will be evident. Looking inside the famous 80/20 rule one can find that five percent of the customers generate close to 50% of the profits while the bottom 50% of the customers generate only 5% of the total profit. Many companies have a hard time identifying which customers belong to each group. A strategic deployment of Business Analytics provides the answers instantly.
Even when sales revenue is growing, management should be able to ask key questions and find the answers right away, so the train of thought isn’t interrupted:
- Is revenue growing profitably? Where? How and Why?
- Are we paying sales reps commissions for bringing in unprofitable tonnage?
- Can we quickly tell whether the growth trend is just over last month, last quarter, same quarter last year or year to date?
- How about the profit growth of the last 52 weeks compared to the previous 52 weeks? Is it really growing?
- Is our growth accelerating or decelerating? How much?
- How is our profit growth versus budget or business plan? Where is it failing to meet objectives? Why?
- Which competitors are threatening our business?
- In what regions and market segments can we maximize our growth?
A BI solution is fundamental to find answers to the seven layers of WHY's in order to get to the root cause of issues. Being able to understand and correct these issues faster than the competition provides the company a competitive advantage regardless of how small the business is. In the past deploying a BI solution was not affordable by small companies, not only due to licensing cost but also because the internal and external resources needed for set-up and maintenance.

While IT may own the physical aspects of the data (storage, security, format, connectivity, etc.), the Business (e.g. Marketing & Sales) must own its strategic meaning and be committed to auditing and maintaining its high quality.

A survey by Gartner Research found that poor data quality costs companies an average $8 million per year. In a different study published by The Data Warehousing Institute more than 50% of companies experience customer dissatisfaction and cost problems due to poor data.

With well over 500 million users around the globe, it’s no wonder that spreadsheets are the de-facto Business Intelligence/ Analytics application.

To increase the return of a given BI investment requires maximizing the extra profit the company makes a result of the BI deployment.
In his Theory of Constraints, Dr. Goldratt states very clearly that in a for profit company, the main goal is to achieve sustainable profitability. In other words, it’s to “make money now and in the future”.

Having seen BI implementations ranging from the very good to the very bad, I think a BI solution needs to be:

1) User friendly, self-help oriented and designed for the users and not for IT experts, because constantly needing an IT person to run SQL, MDX or complex reports is a slow and unproductive process for everyone.

Having representatives of all business areas attend the vendor presentations and participate in the BI selection process is fundamental to develop commitment and support. Of course, IT leads and facilitates the process.

In order to succeed, a BI project needs to be an equal partnership between IT and all the business sectors that will use the solution. A clear understanding and agreement on the definitions of user needs, metrics and dimensions is the base of a system that people will like and use.

2) The solution needs to accommodate a flexible design of the meta-data to be "business intuitive" because you do not want business folks to rely on analysts as intermediaries to translate BI reports into useful information through extensive and time consuming manipulation of data exported to spreadsheets.

3) The BI tool needs to be fast and interactive (like OLAP cubes) to be able to drill down, drill through and filter, so everyone can uncover the root cause of problems in a very few minutes.

4) The ability to connect multiple data sources is fundamental to enrich the scope of the decisions. Merging internal transaction data with external market intelligence will ensure a 360 view of the market-business-profit reality, instantly, right from the BI software. This gives the company a competitive edge, because the competition is still likely to rely on internal raw data from transaction driven static reports and managers’ intuition.

5) Top management needs to fully commit to the project, and once implemented should demand that the organization continues to use it, strengthening the data-driven culture, so BI does not become the flavor of the month.

Finally, while cost may be important to some folks, Return on the BI Investment is the ultimate measure of success. If the selection and configuration of the BI solution allows the company to beat the competition, increase market share, revenue and profit everybody wins.

By Bill Cabiró and Strat-Wise LLC

„Please visit their web site at www.strat-wise.com for additional articles and resources on the strategic use of Business Intelligence and Analytics”

As the global market for Business Intelligence and Analytics continues to experience double digit growth, BI vendors from around the globe will offer creative and lower cost solutions to gain share in the mid and small size company segments that are turning to BI for the first time.

Cloud computing vendors will expand their offerings to include ETL, Data warehouse, reporting, OLAP, advanced visualization and dashboards in one package for the early adopters that moved passed the security concerns.

Software companies will follow the IBM-Cognos lead integrating advanced statistical packages and predictive analytics modeling into their current BI solutions.

More vendors will offer better mobile BI, analytics and advanced visualization applications.

More companies will realize that they can use BI/ Analytics beyond the back office tactical day-to-day operation. They will start to exploit the power of BI software to perform strategic and competitive analysis on the fly to understand market trends better than the competition and increase market share, revenue and profit.

More companies will realize that the semantic quality of their data is constraining the Business Analytics results. They will start to cleanse, organize and structure the data to contain more strategic meaning and provide direction to grow the business.

Some companies will gradually realize they have built unnecessary complexities in the configuration of analytic, BI tools and data marts. While this isn’t an impediment to IT or analyst experts, it causes casual business users to underutilize or not utilize at all the systems. This will gradually change towards a more business intuitive, self serve “analytics for the masses” model.

By Bill Cabiró and Strat-Wise LLC

„Please visit their web site at www.strat-wise.com for additional articles and resources on the strategic use of Business Intelligence and Analytics”

According to a study published by Gartner, the Business Intelligence market increased by 13,4% in 2010, the total value of the global BI market reaching $ 10.5 billion. The growth reflects the customers interest for business efficiency solutions and competitive advantage achievement in economic crisis time. Regarding to Gartner, the BI market is 59% controlled by the major vendors, such as SAP, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft and MicroStrategy.

In a discussion started on Business Intelligence Professionals Group on LinkedIn, 276 BI specialists have tried to answer to a simple question: why does a BI implementations fail and how can specialists prevent this from happening again and again and again and ...