When looking at your challenges for business intelligence, it is important to understand what you want in a solution.  What is your ‘vision’ for a solution for your company?  What would you like the solution to look like?  How would you like it to function?

A Business Intelligence Solution Vision…

What are the key decisions that are being made at your company?  Some decisions require lots of information while others do not.  Identify the decisions that need lots of information.

Who are the decision makers?  Who are the people making those decisions?

What information do they need to make their decisions?  Where is the information [data] located?  What database or application holds the information?

How should that information be presented?  The needed information should be presented to the decision maker in a meaningful format.  Do you need to perform any analysis on the information?

What is the timing of the decisions?  Do they need the information in Real-Time? Or, is daily good enough? What is the needed timeframe?

I would suggest adding one step before you start your decision process – investigate whether there is a company out there that can provide your solution ‘vision’ before you start compromising. 

Implemented properly, a business intelligence solution will provide the right information to the right person at the right time and in the right format.  The result – decision makers in your company will be able to quickly make well informed decisions that lead to increased revenues, decreased costs and mitigate risk.

Your Thoughts…

Can your company deliver the right information to the right person at the right time and in the right format? 

www.coldwatertech.com

Why do you need a business intelligence solution?  What are your objectives for putting a solution in place?  Your objectives are the business benefits that you expect to achieve as a result of spending time and exerting effort to complete your business intelligence project.

Suggestions follow…

Business Intelligence solutions exist to provide the people within your company with the information necessary to make the best decisions possible.  Improved business decisions should increase revenues, decrease costs and mitigate risk.

Increase Revenues – Create KPI’s [key performance indicators] that focus on sales and your customers.  If your biggest customer is purchasing less this year than last, isn’t it important to know why?  If your rate of closing deals is going down, you should address it.  In this economy, it is no longer good enough to have ‘happy’ customers; you must have ecstatic customers – ones that will recommend your company to others.

Decrease Costs – Get the right information to the right person at the right time in the right format so that they can make critical business decisions.  Identify and monitor your KPI’s to reduce costs. 

Mitigate Risk – Learning that a KPI isn’t being met at the end of a month or a quarter is not soon enough.  We all know that if we catch a problem early and fix it, we are much better off than if we let it fester for a month or quarter.

Implemented properly, a business intelligence solution will provide the right information to the right person at the right time and in the right format.  The result – decision makers in your company will be able to quickly make well informed decisions.

Your Thoughts…

Can your company deliver the right information to the right person at the right time and in the right format? 

www.coldwatertech.com

Gartner says – Because of lack of information, processes, and tools, through 2012, more than 35 percent of the top 5,000 global companies will regularly fail to make insightful decisions about significant changes in their business and markets.

Much of the information organizations use to make operational decisions comes piece meal or too late.  They may have a lot of information, but not necessarily the right information.  This issue persists despite major advances in process automation and metrics management systems.  

Even today, many companies gather information into spreadsheets to support their decision making.  This information tends to be incomplete and out of date which increases the risk of an incorrect business decision.  These mistakes can be costly.

Decision Support Systems [DSS] have cropped up to provide information to decision makers.  They are a class of information systems (including but not limited to computerized systems) that support business and organizational decision-making activities.  A properly designed DSS is an interactive software-based system intended to help decision makers compile useful information from a combination of raw data, documents, personal knowledge, or business models to identify and solve problems and make decisions.

That buzzword appears to be giving way to Business Intelligence [BI].  BI refers to computer-based techniques used in spotting, digging-out, and analyzing business data, such as sales revenue by products and/or departments or associated costs and incomes.

BI technologies provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations. Common functions of Business Intelligence technologies are reporting, online analytical processing, analytics, data mining, business performance management, benchmarking, text mining, and predictive analytics.

In order to make well informed business decisions, the right information needs to be available to the right person at the right time and in the right format.

Your Thoughts…

Can your company deliver the right information to the right person at the right time and in the right format?

In my last blog, I made a case for making better business decisions.  I said that business intelligence [access to information] leads to increased revenues, decreased costs and risk mitigation.

Today, the Aberdeen Group makes the case…

They say that ‘Best-in-Class’ companies are using Business Intelligence dashboard tools both tactically for operational visibility as well as strategically for more forward looking analysis in order to drive significant improvement in operating profit and customer service.

They go on to say – a well executed pervasive Business Intelligence strategy can deliver substantial performance results to an organization.  With more employees involved in the decision making process and more departments touching the information relevant to decisions, many companies are seeing improvements in decision making speed.

What’s in it for your company?

Improvement in operating profits – With the right information at your fingertips, you can quickly make responsive sales and marketing decisions that focus on your customers. 

Improvement in customer service – Quickly resolve customer issues with access to the right information at the right time.

Improvement in decision making speed – Your Business Intelligence solution will provide the right information to the right person at the right time allowing workers to make decisions much faster.

Improvements in decision making accuracy – With access the right information, you are able to apply some forward looking analysis that should improve your decision accuracy.

The risk of waiting – It takes more time to make business decisions and you can easily make an incorrect decision based on not enough information. 

Your Thoughts…

What is your company doing to support making better business decisions?

Decision making can be regarded as the mental process resulting in the selection of a course of action among several alternatives.  Every decision making process produces a final choice.

Don’t we all want to make a ‘well informed’ decision?  If we are to be well informed, we will have access to all of the necessary information to make the decision.  We will view the alternatives and assess their positives and negatives.  We might want to collaborate with others.  Why?  We want to minimize the risk of making a poor decision.

Gartner says – Because of lack of information, processes, and tools, through 2012, more than 35 percent of the top 5,000 global companies will regularly fail to make insightful decisions about significant changes in their business and markets.

Better Business Decisions lead to…

Increased Revenues – Quickly make responsive sales and marketing decisions that focus on your customers. 

Decreased Costs – Get the right information to the right person at the right time in the right format so that they can make critical business decisions.  Identify and monitor your key performance indicators [KPI] to reduce costs. 

Mitigate Risk – Well informed, better business decisions reduce the risk of errors.

Your Thoughts…

What is your company doing to support making better business decisions?

The ability to make better informed decisions through Business Intelligence [BI] systems is directly related to the cleanliness, relevance and timeliness of that data.  Best-in-Class companies are taking strides to reduce time-to-information; generate a common view of their data; and arm their business decision makers with a high degree of data quality in order to support enhanced business performance.

My Thoughts…

For many years, I have said that companies need the get the right data to the right person at the right time.  Recently, I have added ‘in the right format’ because you must be able to easily interpret the information. 

The Aberdeen Group has used different words to say the same thing.

If your company is going to make better informed decisions, then you will need the right data [cleanliness, relevance] to get into the hands of the right person [relevance] at the right time [timeliness of that data] and presented in a meaningful format.

If your company is like most, you have more than one enterprise application.  In each of these applications, you are gathering more and more data.  Most workers have no idea what data is being gathered daily and if a worker knew how to login and use an enterprise application, most would be unable to find the data they needed.  Given that, I would expect that either it takes a long time to make an informed decision or decisions are made without all of the information needed.

The current state of the economy requires all companies to think about how they do business.  There is a lot more pressure to make the right business decision [critical business decisions].  Those business decisions can be made a lot easier if the decision maker is provided with the right information at the right time in the right format.

Your Thoughts…

Does your company provide the right information to the right person at the right time and in the right format?

Organizations need to realize the value of information. Information can drive new insights to significantly improve the business, especially critical in an uncertain economy. Gartner says, “The economic crisis will reveal which enterprises have the information and tools to support management decisions and which do not.”

My Thoughts…

If your company is like most, you have more than one enterprise application. In each of these applications, you are gathering more and more data.

Most workers have no idea what data is being gathered daily. In larger companies, many workers can’t even identify all of the enterprise applications in use at their company.

If a worker knew how to login and use an enterprise application, most would be unable to find the data they needed.

If a worker needed specific information in order to make some business decision, most would not be able to gather and assemble that information into a single report in a reasonable amount of time.

Is your company able to provide the right information to the right person at the right time and in the right format?

The current state of the economy requires all companies to think about how they do business. There is a lot more pressure to make the right business decision – critical business decisions. Business decisions can be made a lot easier if the decision maker is provided with the right information at the right time in the right format.

Your Thoughts…

How is your company getting the information they need to make critical business decisions?

The amount of data being generated is doubling every year and some think it could double every month.  Company data is a strategic asset and if it’s not used, the company is wasting a valuable asset. 

Most people think of business intelligence as simple queries and reporting.  Why keep looking at the past when you can build in analytics to forecast the future?  Why not use your Business Intelligence [BI] software to bring together data from disparate parts of the company?  Then perform analysis, run reports and make predictions based on the gathered data. 

My Thoughts…

If your company is like most, you have more than one enterprise application.  In each of these applications, you are gathering more and more data.  And, as they were saying at the conference – this data is a strategic asset.

Today, many decision makers log into each of their various enterprise applications to gather data – they will end up creating a ‘single version of the truth’.  Generally, it will be in the form of a spreadsheet.  To achieve this task, they must be able to:

• Log into each of the applications
• Know how to use each of the applications
• Know how to use Excel
• Understand how people need to see the data
• Know how to build formulas for analytics

A well implemented Business Intelligence solution automates these tasks.

A BI implementation will be integrated to ‘the right data’ applications.  This eliminates the need for users to be able to log into the applications and eliminates the need to know how to use each application.

‘The right person’ will log into a single application [the Business Intelligence solution] to gather the information they need to make decisions.

The information will be available at ‘the right time’.

The information will be displayed in ‘the right format’.

Business Intelligence can be more than just queries & reporting, it can provide Analytics.  Create and run meaningful analytics against your company data.  Key Performance Indicators [KPI] are a great place to start.  Monitor your KPI’s to make sure your company is running efficiently.

The current state of the economy requires all companies to think about how they do business.  There is a lot more pressure to make the right business decisions.  Those business decisions can be made a lot easier if your decision makers are provided with the right information at the right time in the right format.

Your Thoughts…

How is your company getting the information they need to make critical business decisions?

The recession is fostering interest in Business Intelligence [BI] software, which helps companies analyze the data they collect for new cost-cutting or sales opportunities.

Business Intelligence software can bring together data from disparate parts of the company.  Once that happens, companies can do analysis, run reports and make predictions based on past performance.  Some BI software lets companies weave in external information, such as the price of gas or the unemployment rate in certain regions, to better understand how market swings or economic trends are affecting customer behavior and the company.

My Thoughts…

Why even consider Business Intelligence software?  I contend that a Business Intelligence solution designed for your company will reduce costs, increase revenues and mitigate risk. 

In this economy, I can’t imagine a company whose business objectives don’t include reducing costs, increasing revenues and mitigating risk.  How can a Business Intelligence solution help?

Reduce costs – Get the right information to the right person at the right time in the right format so that they can make critical business decisions.  Identify and monitor your key performance indicators [KPI] to reduce costs. 

Increase revenues – Create KPI’s that focus on sales and your customers.  If your biggest customer is purchasing less this year than last, isn’t it important to know why?  If your rate of closing deals is going down, you should address it.  In this economy, it is no longer good enough to have ‘happy’ customers; you must have ecstatic customers – ones that will recommend your company to others.

Mitigate risk – Learning that a KPI isn’t being met at the end of a month or a quarter is not soon enough.  We all know that if we catch a problem early and fix it, we are much better off than if we let it fester for a month or quarter.

The current state of the economy requires all companies to think about how they do business.  There is a lot more pressure to make the right business decisions.  Those business decisions can be made a lot easier if your decision makers are provided with the right information at the right time in the right format.

Your Thoughts…

What steps is your company taking to become one of the winners?

‘The only way to ensure that a company’s supply chain is able to adapt to continuous business changes fast enough is to establish an adequate level of supply chain intelligence.  This requires putting in place processes and tools to effectively monitor supply chain performance and notify specific process managers before problems turn into disruptions.’

My Thoughts…

Last week, I asked ‘What difference would it make to your company if you could immediately see if a ratio or number was headed in the wrong direction?’  Aberdeen’s answer ‘Put in place processes and tools to effectively monitor supply chain performance and notify specific process managers before problems turn into disruptions.’

Over the past couple of weeks I have been touting that ‘In order to make critical business decisions, decision makers need the right information at the right time and in the right format’.  Aberdeen says about Business Intelligence – ‘The cutting-edge supply chain Business Intelligence technologies are pervasive and role-based – they are embedded into the specific supply chain processes and can provide immediate intelligence to the process owners.  These capabilities should help uncover new revenue and savings opportunities with the help of advanced analytics.’

With the economy in its current state, we can easily see that most companies are looking for ways to cut costs.  Managing and improving your supply chain is one path to reduce costs.  While most business intelligence implementations rely heavily on looking at historical information, applying analytics to your solution can help you look forward.  Look forward to uncover new revenue and savings alternatives.

Blast out of this economic downturn as a winner – Provide your decision makers with the right information at the right time in the right format.

Your Thoughts…

What steps is your company taking to become one of the winners?